ACADEMY OF SAINT GABRIEL REPORT 2975 http://www.s-gabriel.org/2975 ************************************ ************************************************* * * * NOTE: Later research turned up additional * * information relevant to this report. * * See the end of the letter for details. * * * ************************************************* 17 Jan 2005 From: Aryanhwy merch Catmael Greetings from the Academy of S. Gabriel! You wanted to know if is an appropriate name for a 15th-16th century Turkish woman, and asked if it would be appropriate to add a byname such as 'the perfumer/perfume merchant' or 'the silk/fabric merchant' to your father's name. You also asked if we could provide an Arabic rendering of your name. Here is the information we have found. is a fine name for your period. Both feminine and masculine are found as Turkish names in the 16th century, and we found a number of examples of 'daughter of X' bynames in the same time period, including and . [1] Occupational bynames in Turkish were fairly rare. We found one clear example, a man in 1519 whose byname 'watchmaker'. We also found 16th-century records of people who were described in the text of the court documents as having certain occupations, but we do not know whether these were occupational bynames or just job descriptions: [1] helvacI sweetmaker tu"ccar merchant hallac, cotton-beater reis captain bazarci shopkeeper In particular, may have been a title rather than part of the name. Here, the quotation mark represents two dots over the preceding letter, represents a c-cedilla, represents a dotted 'i', and stands for an undotted 'i'. These letters represent different vowels in Turkish. Of course, these names were originally recorded in Arabic script; our source uses modern Turkish spelling to transliterate the Arabic. The modern Turkish word for 'silk' is , but we were unable to find any Turkish word, modern or otherwise, that means 'silk merchant'. There also doesn't appear to be a native word for 'perfume'. In modern Turkish, we found the words and , obviously borrowings from French, and which means 'beautiful smell'. itself means 'smell, scent, odor'. [4] We simply don't know enough about medieval Turkish to determine whether any of these could have been used in an occupational byname in the 16th century. The Turks used to use the Arabic script, with modifications borrowed from Persian use of the same alphabet. The Arabic script is rather awkward for Turkish, since it can't express vowels well. Because of the structure of the Arabic language, this "defect" is a plus when writing Arabic, but because Turkish has a substantially different structure, Arabic is not suited for representing Turkish. In Turkish, Arabic and Persian loanwords were almost always spelled as they were in the original language, and it wouldn't surprise us if the same was true of names, too. [2,3] We believe that in general, the Arabic spelling of a name would work fine as a Turkish spelling of the name. We hope that this letter has been useful to you and that you won't hesitate to write us again if any part was unclear or you have further questions. Research and commentary on this letter was provided by Arval Benicoeur, Talan Gwynek, Ursula Georges, Maridonna Benvenuti, Juliana de Luna, Samuel White, and Gunnvor silfraharr. For the Academy, -Aryanhwy merch Catmael, 16 Jan 05 -- References: [1] Whitcher, Ursula. "Sixteenth-Century Turkish Names" (WWW: Self- published, 2002). http://www.doomchicken.net/~ursula/sca/onomastics/ottoman/ [2] private correspondance with Samuel White. [3] Bright, William & Peter T. Daniels, eds., _The World's Writing Systems_, (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1996). [4] _Redhouse Portable Dictionary: English-Turkish, Turkish-English_ (Istanbul: Redhouse Press, 1975). - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Addendum, Ursula Georges, 16 June 2005 Sixteenth-century laws regulating guilds and trades in Istanbul list a group of perfumers, as well as several different groups of tradesmen specializing in the sale and manufacture of fabric [*]: `At.t.arlar (perfumers/ herbalists) At.lascIlar (satin-makers) Bezza^zlar (cloth-sellers) Bo"ru"mcekciler (crepe-makers) C,uk.acIlar (broadcloth-makers) Cu"lla^h (weavers) Derziler (tailors) Gazzazlar (silk manufacturers) H)ayyat.lar (seamsters) Kemh)acIlar (brocade-makers) Valeciler (silk gauze-makers) We can form the corresponding singular nouns by dropping the final <-lar> or <-ler>, which is the standard plural ending in Turkish: `At.t.ar (perfumer/ herbalist) At.lascI (satin-maker) Bezza^z (cloth-seller) Bo"ru"mcekci (crepe-maker) C,uk.acI (broadcloth-maker) Derzi (tailor) Gazzaz (silk manufacturer) H)ayyat. (seamster) Kemh)acI (brocade-maker) Valeci (silk gauze-maker) We don't know the singular form of 'weavers'. A perfumer named might have been known as <`At.t.ar Abbas>, though the data we have suggests plain is more likely. [*] Eunjeong Yi, _Guild dynamics in seventeenth-century Istanbul: fluidity and leverage_, Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2004, Appendix A, pp. 245-247. Based on the Kanunna^me of 1501 and a Kanunna^me from the reign of Suleyman the Magnificent (ruled 1520-1566).