Flowers and plants

Özgül is not a rose. The TDK dictionary lists it as an adjective meaning “specific, peculiar to something”, and it is not split into öz + gül. That is the first trap when sorting flower surnames: a final -gül does not always mean the flower. Real -gül compounds are still the largest part of this hub.

Gül and its compounds

Gül comes from Persian gul and in Turkish names both the rose and, more broadly, beauty. As a head word in surnames it is highly productive. Akgül “white rose”, Sarıgül “yellow rose” and Karagül “dark rose” are built with a colour. Şengül uses the adjective şen, “cheerful”: “merry rose”. Several of these compounds are also women's given names in Türkiye. The traffic between surname and given name is more visible with flowers than with most other groups.

Vowel harmony is not required across the seam. In Akgül a front vowel follows a back one without any strain. Nothing changes in the sounds either; Sarıgül simply writes the two words together.

Other flowers

Lale, “tulip”, comes from Persian lāle and was a major motif of Ottoman garden culture and ornament. Sümbül, “hyacinth”, also reached Turkish through Persian. Menekşe, “violet”, is linked to Persian banafša. For nergis, “narcissus”, dictionaries cite Persian as the intermediary and an older Greek source. Karanfil, “carnation”, is traced back to Greek. The hub shows plainly how much of Turkish flower vocabulary came from Persian.

Turkic plant words are here too. Çiçek, “flower”, is attested since Old Turkic. Filiz is a fresh shoot or tender sprout, yaprak a leaf. Yonca, “clover”, is grown as fodder.

The 1934 angle

Article 5 of the Surname Regulation took as its principle that new surnames be drawn from the Turkish language. Gül, lale and sümbül were Persian in origin, but they had been ordinary Turkish words for centuries. So “from the Turkish language” can be read as covering everyday Turkish vocabulary, whatever its source. Our sources contain no list showing which individual words were accepted.

Limits and points of interest

Grains such as buğday and ekin belong to the farming hub, and trees have their own category. Flowers and herbaceous plants stay here.

What makes this hub worth a look is how deeply loanwords sit in Turkish. For a Turkish speaker today gül is not a foreign word. A surname that joins a Persian head to a Turkic colour word, such as Akgül or Sarıgül, is the shortest proof of that.