Abstract
Interaction among people of different cultures and the resulting effect on personal, animal and geographic names. A case study on the town of Şavşat in Artvin
This study focuses on how communication and interaction among people of different cultures and languages affect personal, animal and geographic names. For this purpose the town of Şavşat in Artvin province was chosen as the region because of its close geographical, cultural and historical ties with Georgian and Persian peoples and cultures. The names in questions mainly belong to Turkmen people who speak a dialect of Turkish and who live in the villages on the slope of Yalnızçam Mountain. These people began migrating from Caucasians in the 18th century. The data was gathered through snowball sampling and document analysis was done on registration books of Births and Deaths.
The study demonstrated that male and female personal names in Turkmen villages in Şavşat, for the most part were borrowed from Arabic and Persian languages. It is, however, interesting to note that there appears to be no direct relationship between personal names and the ethnicity. This may be due to the fact that the relationship with different nations and cultures dates back to thousands of years ago. Further Turkmens were influenced by Persian language and culture before arriving to the region. As for Arabic names, they began to appear in their life after the introduction of Islam. On the other hand, geographical names are different from personal names. These names were given by local people (Georgians) who had lived in the region before the Turkish settlement. Interestingly, animal names were different from personal and geographical names since most of them are Turkish. In other words the names that were given to farm animals were Turkish.
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Keywords
Caucasians, Turkmens, interaction, personal names, Şavşat, culture, language
