The word "What" in Western Turkish (Old Anatolian Turkish, Ottoman Turkish, Türkiye Turkish)

One of the building blocks which make up language is words. The word is the fundemental part of the sentences we use to communicate in our lives. Words are used in sentences with various meanings and functions, either alone or combined with other words. Throughout history Turkish language, has influenced many languages and has been influenced by some languages due to social, cultural and geographical conditions. Many words in our language have changed up to now; this change manifested itself both semantically in some words and structurally in others. Some words have disappeared completely, some have preserved themselves until today. Although it has undergone some changes in different periods throughout the history of the language, one of the words that has preserved its use up to the present moment is the word "what". The word "what" has many different uses, alone or in phrases. In the study, the texts that reflect the periodic developments and characteristics of Turkish languages from past to present will be discussed and the use of the word "what" in these texts will be investigated. In order to see the different functions of the word, first of all, information about the word types in Turkish is given. After mentioning Western Turkish within the periods of the Turkish language, the historical development and functions of the word are emphasized. Usage examples of the word "what" are given in texts selected from three branches of Western Turkish; the detected uses were classified as structural and semantic. The word "what" was evaluated in terms of word type and it was determined that it was included in many different word types. It has been shown with examples that the word "what", which is a question word, has indirect question, pseudo-question, reinforcement and negativity functions in addition to its real question meaning. In addition to word structure and function features; it has also been evaluated in terms of its semantic properties alone, with the affixes it takes or with the word groups it is in. Keywords: the word "what", word class, function, structure, meaning.