Plains, highlands and countryside

The word yayla is tied to summer. Dictionaries define it as a cool, high pasture where animals graze in summer, and link it to yay, an old word for summer. Its counterpart is kışlak, the winter quarters. The pair keeps a trace of seasonal movement between lowland and upland in the language itself. As a surname, though, Yayla only names that high pasture. It says nothing about whether a family ever kept herds.

Words for open land

This hub collects words for open and cultivated land. Ova is a wide, flat plain. Kır is open country outside the town; the same form also means “grizzled, ash-grey”, so in some compounds the intended sense stays unclear. Çayır is a grassy, moist meadow, and çimen a shorter, denser turf. Bozkır, “steppe”, is a single headword in TDK for a dry, treeless plain. The elements boz and kır are visible inside it, but the dictionary treats it as a word with its own meaning, so it is not split.

Two words stand out for worked land. Bağ (vineyard) and bahçe (garden) came into Turkish from Persian; bahçe goes back to a diminutive of Persian bāġ. Tarla, “field”, is generally taken to be Turkic. The hub thus puts the shepherd's pasture next to the farmer's vineyard.

Compounds

Here too a colour element precedes the head: Akova “white plain”, Karaova “black plain”, Yeşilyayla “green highland”. The final noun decides the hub. Vowel harmony does not reach across the seam, so Yeşilyayla runs front vowels straight into back ones. Forms in -lI built on a specific place name, such as Ovacıklı, move to the place-name hubs.

1934: those who did not choose

Article 8 of the Surname Law gave the senior civil administrator of the place of registration the power to give surnames to people who did not choose one. Article 29 of the Surname Regulation, in its 1934 text, added that for anyone without a surname by July 1936, the governor, district governor or an official they appointed would choose one, and the person had to use it. Whether a given surname came about this way or by the family's own choice cannot be known without the records. That holds for this hub as for any other.

Why it matters

Ova, yayla and bağ show that surnames drew not only on words of strength and height but also on ordinary words for land. Agent nouns such as Bağcı “vine grower” and Bahçıvan “gardener” have their own hub. What stays here is the land itself.