Cognates Based on the FTD

The Frequency Dictionary of Turkish (FDT, Aksan et al., 2017) was developed with the consideration of assisting learners of Turkish as a second or foreign language. The base corpus of the FDT is the 50-million-word Turkish National Corpus (TNC). The TNC was constructed following the BNC to form a balanced and representative corpus of contemporary Turkish (Aksan et al., 2012). Both written and spoken language were involved in the corpus. Thus, the FDT includes the 5000 most frequently used words in contemporary written and spoken Turkish. However, in order to have a clear comparison with the NGSL, the first 2801 words from the FDT were examined.

The result shows that 244 Turkish words were detected with English cognates that share similar or same spelling and pronunciation, which counted for 8.71% of the top 2801 words in the FDT. There were 15 loanword cognates in English (0.54%) that shared different spelling and pronunciation with the Turkish words. As for the English loanword cognates considered as sharing similar or same spelling but different pronunciation, 8 were detected, which took 0.29% of the top 2801 words in the FDT. 26 words (0.93%) were categorized as having English loanword cognates that share only similar pronunciation. For the words that partial English cognates were identified, there were 9, taking 0.32% of the total words. Lastly, there were 116 words, namely 4.14%, in the list having false cognates in English.

Turkish-English Loanword Cognates Based on the FDT can be downloaded by the following link (Appendix 3).

https://doi.org/10.14744/felt.2021.3.2.2