ACADEMY OF SAINT GABRIEL REPORT 1907 http://www.s-gabriel.org/1907 ************************************ 17 Jan 2000 From: Alan Terlep Greetings, Here's the information we found on the name , which you wanted to use as the name of a Turkish woman from the period between 1100 and 1600. The names and both appear in a list of Arabic names in our library. We're guessing that the name you asked about is a typo for the name , which is also listed in this article. (1) We don't know a whole lot about Turkish naming practices. However, we do have some short lists of Turkish names. Many of the names in these lists are Arabic, which tells us that the Turks adopted Arabic names relatively soon after they came into contact with Arab culture. However, the examples we have show that the Turks tended to use the most popular Arabic names rather than the more unusual ones. We have a list of eleven Turkish womens' names from early in your period: (2) Fatima Zeliha Zubeyde Uruveyde Eyne Kutlu Saljan Burla Boghazja Chichek Yenge Of these names, , and are definitely derived from Arabic names; might also be borrowed from Arabic. This suggests that , which was a popular Arabic name, could also have been used by a Turkish woman. However, a documented name would be better re-creation. The rest of your name is in Arabic as well, and we have doubts that it is historically accurate for a Turkish woman. We don't know whether would have been used by a Turkish man--although it is an Arabic name, it isn't a particularly common one and so we have some doubts about whether it would have been used by a Turk. We also doubt that the Arabic byname would be historically accurate for a Turkish person. If you did use it, you should note that is a male form, and so it would be understood to describe your father rather than yourself. To apply it to yourself, you should use the feminine form . We don't have many good suggestions for alternatives, but it appears that Turkish women, even those with names that derived from Arabic, either used descriptive bynames in the Turkish language or were known only by a single name. Pedro de Alcazar, Raquel Buenaventura, Amant le Marinier, Miguel Santos de Borja, Juliana de Luna, Walraven van Nijmegen, Talan Gwynek, and Arval Benicoeur contributed to this letter. We hope this has been helpful, and that we can continue to assist you. Your servant, Alan Fairfax Academy of S. Gabriel January 17, 2000 (1) Da'ud ibn Auda, "Arabic Naming Practices and Names List," _Compleat Anachronist_ #51, "The Islamic World" (Milpitas: SCA, Inc, Autumn 1990; WWW: J. Mittleman, 1998) [URL:http://www.panix.com/~mittle/names/daud/arabic-naming/] (2) Devora bat Shimshon, correspondence of 25 November 1999. The list is extracted from Geoffrey L. Lewis (ed.) _The Book of Dede Korkut_. (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1974).