Analysis of place names in Çetinkaya, Yağmurca, and Hıdırellez villages, affiliated with Bafra district in Samsun province, inthe context of folk etymology and toponymy

The field of onomastics, which examines various types of proper names, is divided into various subfields. Toponymy, one of the subfields of onomastics, is a branch of science that investigates the origins, structures, meanings, developments, traditions, and principles of place names. Etymology, on the other hand, is a branch of science that studies the origins of words in terms of their historical development processes and within the framework of semantics. Folk etymology, on the other hand, explains the origins of words through attribution and fabrication rather than through etymological analysis and solid evidence. Folk etymologies arise as a result of the forgetting of the real reasons for the origin of a place name, which is then usually associated with legends or folk tales by the public and re-explained. Therefore, in the study of place names in the context of folklore, it is necessary to utilize disciplines such as history, geography, and, in conjunction, narratology. Place names have generally been approached and examined within the scope of linguistic studies based on the fundamental approaches of onomastics in previous studies. The material obtained has been subjected to various analyses focusing on lexicon, semantics, and genre. In this study, place names obtained as a result of field research conducted in the villages of Çetinkaya, Yağmurca, and Hıdırellez in the district of Bafra, affiliated with the province of Samsun, have been classified and analyzed in the context of folk etymology, in addition to layer analysis, genre classification, and lexico-semantic classification. Accordingly, the place names obtained from the field have been examined and analyzed within the context of folkloric-centric approaches, focusing on folk etymology and narratology. Keywords: Folklore, Onomastics, Toponymy, Folk Etimology.