Turkish language

Vocabulary

Turkish has the resources for building up many new words from old: from nouns:

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göz "eye",

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gözlük "eyeglasses"

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gözlükçü "someone who sells glasses"

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gözlükçülük "the business of selling glasses"

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and from verbs:

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yat- "lie down"

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yat?r- "lay down "

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yat?r?m "instance of laying down: deposit, investment"

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yat?r?mc? "depositor, investor".

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Turkish vocabulary has gone through drastic changes in the history of the language. In the last sixty years, Turkish vocabulary has gone through changes that might take three centuries in another language.

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Replaced old words

When the Turks came from middle Asia to Anatolia about a thousand years ago, they came in contact with Islam and the Arabic societies. Since the Turks accepted Islam, Arabic words (and fewer, yet still many, Persian words) started infiltrating the language. During the course of over six hundred years of the Ottoman Empire, Turkish kept borrowing loan words from these two languages. Towards the end of the 19th century, this got to a point where the language was rather called the Ottoman language. This is because Turkish had been inundated with so many loan words that the language became a mix of Turkish, Arabic and Persian. In contemporary Turkey, the Ottoman language is almost incomprehensible.

Related Topics:
Turks - Islam - Arabic - Persian - Ottoman Empire - Loan words - Ottoman language

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After Atatürk founded the Republic of Turkey, he established the "Turkish Language Foundation" (Türk Dil Kurumu, TDK), whose task was to replace Arabic and Persian origin words with their new Turkish counterparts. The foundation succeeded in removing several hundred Arabic words from the language. While most of the words introduced to the language by TDK are new, TDK also suggested using old Turkish words which had not been used in the language for centuries.

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Older and younger people in Turkey tend to express themselves with different vocabulary. While the generations born up to the 1940s tend to use the old Arabic origin words (even the obsolete ones), the younger generations favor using the new expressions. Some new words are not used as often as their old counterparts or have failed to convey the intrinsic meanings of their old equivalents.

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Among some of the old words that were replaced are terms in geometry, directions (north, south, east, west), some of the months and many nouns and adjectives. Many new words have also been derived from verbs. Some examples of new and their old counterparts are:

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Please see the discussion section for an extensive list of replaced old words and current loan words

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