Al-

Turkish has two common words for red: kırmızı and al. The Güncel Türkçe Sözlük glosses al as ‘red, crimson’. Phrases such as al yanaklı ‘rosy-cheeked’ show that the word is still alive. In surnames al appears as the first word of a compound.

Being a free-standing word of one syllable, it has no harmonic variants. Whatever follows, it stays al. Nor is harmony expected inside the compound: Alkan has back vowels only, while Altekin mixes back and front.

It does the work of a colour adjective. It marks the second element as ‘red’. The centre of meaning stays with that second element. Altaş is ‘red stone’ and Alkaya ‘red rock’; both are grouped with words for stone and rock. Albayrak means ‘red flag’. Alsoy is built with soy ‘lineage’ and reads as ‘red lineage’; here the colour carries a figurative value.

In some examples the second element has two readings. The kan of Alkan is usually explained as ‘blood’, which gives ‘red blood’. A competing explanation ties it to the title han ‘khan’, but that explanation is disputed. The tekin of Altekin is the Old Turkic title ‘prince’. Modern Turkish also uses tekin in the sense ‘safe, not ill-omened’. In Aldoğan, doğan may be read either as the falcon or as ‘born, rising’.

The real difficulty of this page is that many surnames beginning with these two letters have nothing to do with the element. Alp, Alper and Alpay come from alp ‘hero’; Alper is analysed as alp + er. Altın is ‘gold’, and Ali is a personal name of Arabic origin. Altan and Altay are separate names with their own etymologies. Alemdar means ‘standard-bearer’. Alaca is a word of its own, ‘pied, many-coloured’. Alkış ‘applause’ is likewise a headword and is not split into al and kış ‘winter’. For this reason the Al- tag is given only to a small set of surnames whose meaning is clearly built on ‘red’.