-tekin

In the Orkhon inscriptions the word appears as tigin. In Old Turkic it named a male member of the ruling family, a ‘prince’. Today it lives on in surnames as tekin. Alptekin, Aytekin, Ertekin and Göktekin are the best-known examples of the pattern.

Tekin is not a suffix but an old title word. Vowel harmony does not change it, and the form stays the same whatever element precedes it. The difference between historical tigin/tegin and modern tekin reflects sound change over the centuries.

In surnames tekin is the final element and the head of the compound. The word before it describes the prince. Alptekin means ‘heroic prince’, Aytekin ‘prince bright as the moon’, and Ertekin ‘manly, valiant prince’. Göktekin, with gök ‘sky’, reads as ‘prince of the sky’ or ‘blue prince’. Altekin combines it with al ‘red, crimson’. Many of these compounds are also used as given names.

What complicates matters is a second tekin in modern Turkish. That word means ‘deserted, empty’. In negative phrases it also means ‘not ill-omened, safe’: tekin olmayan bir yer is an uncanny place. Whether the two senses go back to the same word is disputed, and dictionaries approach them from different angles.

The distinction matters for analysing a surname. In compounds built with old name elements such as Alp-, Er- and Gök-, the ‘prince’ reading comes to the fore, since those elements belong to the field of titles and valour. Even so, where no source covers a particular surname, both readings are given. The bare surname Tekin is filed among the old Turkic titles, and its page explains both meanings.

Few false friends are known for this element. Most forms ending in -tekin really do contain the word. The real question is which tekin the meaning rests on. A second check is whether the compound is a given name or only a surname. That affects the category: compounds that are given names go to the Turkic name elements.

In short, -tekin is an old court title carried into surnames. The same sequence of sounds, however, evokes a different meaning in today’s language. A careful analysis keeps the two layers apart.