turkish phonology and morphology (türkçe ses ve b‹ç‹mb‹lg‹s‹)

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Turkish Phonology and Morphology (Türkçe Ses ve Biçim Bilgisi)
Semantic Change
Another consideration in regard to word formation is the existence of semantic
neologisms which represent semantic change in words. A word’s meaning may
broaden to include more semantic features. For example, the word alan in
Turkish was used to mean ‘a plane area’, but now it is also used to refer to ‘a
professional field’. The word dal has a similar etymology. As another type of
semantic change, a word’s meaning may lose some of its semantic content. For
example, the verb dirilmek was used to mean both ‘to live’ and ‘to resurrect’ in
Old Turkish. It seems that its meaning has now been narrowed down to the
latter only (Aksan, 1998: 134-135). Reversals may also occur in which the
meaning of a particular word may be reversed from positive to negative called
semantic degradation, or from negative to positive called semantic elevation.
For example, çocuk was once used to mean piglet (Tietze, 2002: 525), but its
meaning is elevated from ‘non-human’ to ‘human’ to mean child (son) in
colloquial Turkish. The word alçak in old Turkish meant modest, but in modern
Turkish it has a more negative meaning: filthy.
A special case of semantic change is called eponymy through which proper
nouns are converted into common nouns. For example, the word çapano¤lu in
Fazla kar›flt›rma alt›ndan çapano¤lu ç›kar or bunda bir çapano¤lu var is
associated with complex or objectionable, or even disturbing situations or people.
During the reign of Selim III, Çapano¤lu Süleyman Bey was in close contact with
the Sultan and was consulted by him for supressing any kind of political or military
problem in Anatolia. At that time, economically strong Çapano¤ullar› were
prevalent everywhere in Anatolia and the name of this family was commonalized
to a noun to reflect ‘powerful prevalence’ (fienyap›l›, 1996: 10-11).
Metaphorical Extension
Another method of word formation is metaphor: using an existing word to refer
to an object with similar properties of its referent. This process can be considered
to be one type of semantic change in that words do not undergo any morphological
modification, but rather they adopt new meanings or new uses for the already
existing ones. The output is not a completely new word, but a word with a new
semantic interpretation. For example, çeflme in Turkish is a word of Persian origin.
It is derived with the suffix -a from the stem çaflm which means eye. In this
expression, the source of water is viewed as the human organ for seeing (Tietze,
2002: 499). Just like teardrops falling down from an eye, water falls down from a
tap. The way some humanly characterizations are used to describe nature also
constitues an example of metaphorical extension: ‹stanbul [Bo¤az]›, da¤›n [etek]leri,
nehrin karfl› [yaka]s›. The semantics of these words associated with human body
parts is extended to describe geographical locations. These examples show that
language is flexible and creative enough to form new metaphorical extensions at
will as the need arises.
Clipping
Clipping is a reduction process that shortens a long word. For example, the word
Liha as a woman’s name sounded strange to me once until I found out that it was
the short for Saliha. Similarly, the popular talk show host Beyaz is the short for
Beyaz›t. Tel çekmek for telgraf çekmek, oto for otomobil, kondu for gecekondu are
other examples of clipping.