Source — Wiktionary, "merak" (multilingual)
- Title: merak
- Author: Wiktionary contributors (unauthored, collectively edited)
- Publication: en.wiktionary.org
- URL: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/merak
- Date: undated (live entry)
- Accessed: 2026-09-02
- Type: tertiary — neutral/lexicographic
- Access method note: fetched and read directly from raw HTML (
curlwith a browser User-Agent, then a tag-strip). This project's naive tag-stripping produced a duplicated table-of-contents artifact in the extracted plain text on a first pass; targetedgrep/substring extraction around each language's ownid=anchor in the raw HTML was used instead to isolate each section reliably — noted here as a technique for future sessions extracting multi-language Wiktionary pages.
Extract
- A genuine homonym trap, caught and ruled out: Indonesian, Malay, and Javanese merak is a completely unrelated word meaning "peacock", from Malay merak ultimately from Proto-Austroasiatic *mraːkʔ ("peacock") — not connected in any way to the Ottoman Turkish "curiosity/passion" word. A less careful pass conflating this page's multiple merak entries could have wrongly extended the Balkan loanword family into Southeast Asia; this project explicitly checked and rules that out.
- Albanian merak (colloquial): "great curiosity" (synonym kureshtje); "desire, yearning, craving for something" (dëshirë, gjakim); "great worry, concern, anxiety, uneasiness" (shqetësim); "love, passion" (dashuri, sevda); "care, attention, concern" (kujdes); "fear, insecurity" (frikë, pasiguri, dyshim); "doubt, suspicion"; "regret" (peng, gozhdë) — borrowed from Ottoman Turkish مراق, per two named references (Meyer 1891, Etymologisches Wörterbuch der albanesischen Sprache; a second uncaptured in this project's extract).
- Serbo-Croatian mèrāk (masc., inanimate; Cyrillic мѐра̄к), borrowed from Ottoman Turkish: "desire, yearning, and enjoyment thereof"; "enjoyment of the simple things in life." The second gloss is strikingly close in shape to this project's own hygge/lagom pages' "everyday contentment" framing — a genuine cross-word semantic parallel worth flagging (see the word page's See Also).
- Ladino merak (masc.; Hebrew-script spelling מיראק), also borrowed from Ottoman Turkish مراق.
- Turkish merak: "curiosity"; "solicitude"; "worry." Modern Turkish has narrowed to the "curiosity/worry" sense — it does not carry the Greek and South Slavic "passion, soulful application, enjoyment" sense, a genuine semantic divergence across the same loanword's daughters (see the OddFeed source for a proposed historical account of how this split arose).
Gaps
- The Meyer (1891) and other named references for the Albanian etymology are not directly read.
- Bulgarian and Macedonian мерак have entries elsewhere on Wiktionary (named as descendants on the Ottoman Turkish مراق page) but were not separately opened or read on this page; their specific glosses are not independently confirmed by this project beyond the Ottoman Turkish descendants list.