An onomastics study on Trabzon Court Registers in the 17th century (M. 1628-1630)

Names that contain the values of a nation, such as history, culture, religion, language, are a mirror that reflects the world of thought, lifestyle, and vocabulary of that nation. As a matter of fact, it is seen that the Turkish nation also has a long-established tradition of giving names. Onomastics, which started with the ideal of revealing and preserving this tradition, examines proper nouns in terms of origin, meaning, structure and reasons for giving. The aim of this study is to determine the proper names in the sharia registers in Trabzon in the 17th century, to separate them according to their types and to create a dictionary of origin, structure and meaning. All this process aims to shed light on the history of situation of proper names in 17th century Trabzon and offer the opportunity to follow the naming process and tradition in Trabzon. It is also expected to offer the opportunity to follow the tradition of naming. The subject of this study is the examination of the sharia court registers written in Trabzon in the 17th century in terms of proper names. Special names fall within the research area of Onomastics, which is one of the branches of Linguistics. The limited number of theses on onomastics indicates a scientific deficiency for language research. Given the rich Turkish naming tradition, it is clear that a more intense focus should be placed on studies related to this branch of science. Therefore, handling the Sharia Documents, which are the subject of research in fields such as history and law, which are generally transferred to the Latin alphabet and examined from the perspective of the relevant fields, will make important contributions to the field of Turkish language. Within the scope of this study, 464 registry texts covering the two years of the 17th century (1628-1630) were examined. Considering the time limit in the thesis writing process, it was thought that it would be appropriate to consider a section from the middle of the century. In the first part of the study, which consists of three parts, the legal system in the Ottoman Empire and the importance of the sharia registers in this system are mentioned. In the second part, the definition of the name is made and classified according to the way it is given to the assets. The importance of the name and the naming tradition are emphasized. Then, Linguistics and Onomastics, which form the basis of the study, are included. The third part of the study is the analysis part and consists of two tables. The first table includes the classification of proper names determined from the texts according to their types; the second table contains the alphabetical order, frequency, origin, structure and meaning of these names.