The Place of Suffix -IcI in the Formation of Turkish as a Written Language

Abstract

The expansion of Oghuz Turks into larger lands under the Seljuk dominion, and their adoption of a new religion as large masses, took place in periods that are quite close to each other. Although the Persian language continued its influnce in the state apparatus as the official language, the writing of the religious sources to provide large masses of Oghuzs with the proper guidelines for religious practice in Turkish was also an expanding need. The predomination of religious content in the early period writings has been an indicator of this need. The enthusiasm of medrese students who wanted to inform other people about religion whenever they came back to their own communities, stimulated their desire to produce written texts in their spoken language. The endeavours to express the main source of Islam, the Quran, in Turkish also originated from such needs. The comprehension of the Quran in the most correct way brings such a serious responsibility. Therefore, the absence of a written Oghuz language resulted in greater worries about the Quran, for it was never an ordinary text. It seems to be the case that the Turkish expression of certain types of words that were often used in Quran, and were formative of divine attributions, necessitated a special effort, particularly in those Quranic translations. Certain peculiar elements in the Arabic language, such as ism- fail (present participle), sıfat-ı müşebbehe and the exaggerative present participle forms are all alien to Turkish. In this article, we will be examining the endeavours to produce the correspondent Turkish elements with the suffix (-IcI), for these Arabic forms that were not in common use in Turkish.