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It is quite obvious that there are a lot of Persian loanwords in Turkish. Some words, though, I cannot easily figure out which way they travelled.

Take for example trk. küçük, frs. kucak. I have found etymologies for both of them. Is it a coincidence?

Same applies to for example trk. kör, frs. kūr (blind). Where does it come from? Any hard and fast rules for these?

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There are no hard and fast rules; each word has to be looked at separately. kūčak “small” and kōr “blind” both occur already in Middle Persian, and the latter also in Sogdian (written kwr), so they cannot very well be Turkish loanwords. Turkish kör is probably a borrowing from Sogdian or Persian or some other Iranian language; küçük is presumably Turkish and not connected with Persian kūčak.

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  • It's hard for me to accept that küçük in turkish and kūčak in persian are not realted with such a close number of similar phonemes and similar meaning
    – azerafati
    Mar 2, 2016 at 11:46

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