A lexicological evaluation of some hapaxes formed with +sXz suffixes of absent and the suffixes that expand with them in old Turkish

Abstract

The words that are found in only single text and cannot be detected in other texts within the historical and contemporary period that constitute the corpus of a language are termed as “hapax legomenon”. However, it is not known why these words are not found in the subsequent texts. In the historical Turkish language field, it is very difficult to predict whether the words termed as “hapax” emerged due to the author's preference or whether there were intense translation activities, as we observed, for example, especially in the Old Uyghur Turkish period. Because the translators at that period sometimes required new words to express the concepts that were not in their own language and the terminology of the relevant religion. Some of the hapaxes probably have originated in this way. Considering the possibilities proposed by modern lexicography, there are some stages to add a word to the dictionary through social acceptance. Hapaxes, on the other hand, appear to have been identified in a text in certain parts of these stages, while they remained only in the historical period. In the current study, some hapaxes formed with +sXz suffixes of absent and the suffixes that expand with them in old Turkish are discussed. The reason why the mentioned affixes and morphemes are the subject of the study is based on questioning why the words formed with them have discarded. It is noteworthy that some words formed with this suffix and which is not hapax were not used over time and other words were replaced. In this article, therefore, the formation of some hapaxes formed with the relevant morphemes in the corpus containing the Old Turkish period and why they could not be lexicalized are discussed. Keywords: Hapax Legomenon, Lexicography, Lexicalisation, Suffix +sXz, Morpheme.

Keywords

• hapax legomenon
• lexi̇cography
• lexicalisation
• suffix