Abstract
“-mIş GİBİ YAPMAK” IN TURKISH: AFFIX -sIn
Languages change under the influence of the least effort law, needs, language contact, substrate influence, regularization, and many other internal and external factors. For a living language, change is an inevitable, continuous process. Some of the elements of the language are rejected in this process, some are transformed, and some are renewed. Thus, languages are enriched in terms of some of their expression resources, and weakened in some others.
From the past to the present, Turkish has also lost a number of functional language instruments, and was forced to generate new, sometimes less practical, markers for performing the function of the given language instrument. One of these elements is affix -sIn and its derivative affix -msIn. These affixes, witnessed in the Old Turkish, are the elements, which can express in a single word the meaning “to seem/appear to be doing an action, to do an action which resembles an action,” which today can be expressed only with a syntactic union such as “-mış gibi yapmak”.
In the research work, affix -sIn is studied, based on the examination of text, starting from the Old Turkish to Divanü Lügati’t-Türk (DLT), Kutadgu Bilig (KB), Atebetü’l-Hakayık (AH), Kısasü’l-Enbiya (KE), Mukaddimetü’l-Edeb (ME), and other texts, which are fundamental for Turkish language; and on sampling of the use of the form “-mIş gibi yapmak.” Attention is drawn to how the verbs reflect the relation, which uses the aforementioned affix to make nouns out of nouns, and gives the sense of “resemblance”, provided in Turkey Turkish by means of +sI/+msI/+mtrak. An effort was made to demonstrate the way Turkish continues to use affixes, which are believed to derive from the same root as -sIn in the sense of resemblance, but follows a different way in the verb resemblance.
Keywords
Resemblance, -mIş gibi yapmak, affix -sIn, Turkey Turkish.