EurasianStudies_0110..

January-March 2010 JOURNAL OF EURASIAN STUDIES Volume II., Issue 1.
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and become relics of the time. Turan & Özel (p. 105,106) tell that in 1935, in the program of
Aratürk’s party, a total of 245 neologisms, along with their derivations, were used. For example,
for “art” the French derived ar was chosen, for menfaat (benefit), asığ, for müstesna (with the
exception of), ayral, for hemşire (nurse), bakı kadını, for huzur, sükûn (calmness), baysallık, for laik
(lay, adj.), dışdinsel, for memur (civil servant), işyar, for belediye (municipality), şarlık, among
many others. According to a study carried out by the author, out of those 245 words, 146
(59/60 %) survived to our days, and 39 survived with some degree of variation. None of the
words listed above, for example, survived, which number 60 in total.
It is, after all, the people, the users of the language, who will eventually dictate which is to
stay and which is not. It so happened that, as with all living languages, the Turkish lexicon is in
a state of flux, and some words are still competing, being used by speakers, and in such cases it
remains uncertain which one is going to prevail over which in the future. Lewis (1999) describes
3 possible outcomes of words for the neologisms: the ones that gain acceptance and become
wholly integrated into Turkish, the ones that fail to gain acceptance, as mentioned above, and
the ones that do survive, but with a diverse meaning from the intended one when originally
coined. The latter category is dealt, for example, in Mehmet Çelik’s paper entitled “Neologisms
in Contemporary Turkish”, who discusses 11 common pairs of neologisms which are contrasted
according to their meaning and frequency.
Ottomanisms x neologisms in Dualar Kalicidir
Unfortunately, the old Italian adage Traduttore, Traditore, so often repeated when the nuances
of translations that cannot, for some reason, be carried over from the original language to the
target one should be once more repeated in this context. This is so because even with such a rich
literary past as the Portuguese language enjoys, it was hard to find synonyms for pairs such as
durum, a neologism created as recently as 1935 to replace the old vaziyet (from Arabic waḍī c at
“situation; positivism”). Also, the oft-repeated saying among linguists that there are no
synonyms which are exactly alike in meaning is brought into question as this topic is discussed.
That is why no matter the choice of words to translate to word, which was always “situação” in
Portuguese, will not give the reader the full flavor of what the associations that are triggered in
the mind of a Turkish reader. It is interesting to note that this word, durum, was initially only
used jokingly by the population. This is to emphasize the fact that when it comes to languages,
linguists can never be fortune-tellers. But it is important to say that both words co-exist in
modern Turkish, and only time will tell which one is going to prevail.
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