Akademik Dil ve Edebiyat Dergisi

Öz

The words and concepts that build a language are born, live and die, just like living creatures. Of all, some long-term ones defying the centuries may undergo semantic changes over time. In fact, some of the concepts and words even may turn into an exact opposite structure of meaning that they once had due to social events affecting society. From this point of view, each historical text can be analyzed only through the dictionaries of their time. However, for those dealing with ancient texts and their interpretation, this field is full of serious obstacles and pitfalls. Because Turks, unfortunately, did not show the care they show to Arabic and Persian dictionaries for their mother tongue, thinking that they know it well already. Since the language is constantly changing, today, we have difficulty in understanding what they wrote and told centuries ago. As we do not have dictionaries of that period, the only source to be used in order to determine the real meanings of the words and concepts is mostly the text itself. Therefore, apart from the etymological structure changes, the words have adventures of meaning that are shaped by social developments and that proceed in a different medium. Some of the most typical examples of this process of change are the change of lighting needs after the invention of electricity and the fire-related words and concepts that became obsolete and forgotten over time. The memory of the society either produces a word that it needs from scratch or begins to use a word from its existing vocabulary by attributing a new meaning and leaves and forgets it sometime later after done with it. Here, in such conditions that these are not included in the dictionaries, the literary texts are of great value to track these changes, because today the poets are the artists who endeavor to use most of these lost words in their different meanings in the richest way.

As a result, there is an adventurous life story behind every word that is strained through over time and forms today’s language. In this article, the concept of “gül-deste” that endeavors to exist with its “bouquet of roses” or “poetry anthology” meanings in the language of the elders were analyzed by using only the verse texts as a source, and its totally forgotten old meanings were detected with their possible reasons of change.