Surnames of Arabic origin

Kasap, hekim, kâtip. These are everyday Turkish words for ‘butcher’, ‘physician’ and ‘scribe’. All three come from Arabic, and all three are surnames. Most surnames of Arabic origin follow this pattern: a word that settled in Turkish centuries ago was chosen as a family name in 1934.

Arabic words reached Turkish by two routes. The first was the written language. Ottoman Turkish was written in Arabic script, and its law, administration, science and schooling were full of Arabic terms. Part of this vocabulary came through Persian, whose literary language had adopted it earlier. The second route was speech. Andreas Tietze devoted a separate study to words that Anatolian dialects took directly from Arabic, bypassing the written language. The Arabic layer is therefore not uniform. It has a learned side and a popular side.

Turkish fitted these words to its own sound system. Arabic guttural consonants were dropped or softened. Long vowels were mostly shortened. In some words the length or a palatal consonant is still marked with a circumflex: kâtip, hâkim. Arabic ṣādiq became sadık, and qaṣṣāb became kasap. Final b and d turn into p and t: kitap ‘book’, kasap, ümit ‘hope’.

In surnames, Arabic words cluster in a few fields. Occupations come first: Kasap ‘butcher’, Hekim ‘physician’, Kâtip ‘scribe’, Attar ‘seller of spices and scents’. Adjectives of character are a second field: Sadık ‘loyal, true to one’s word’, Asil ‘noble’. Nur ‘light’ is also frequent. Then there are personal names. Names of Arabic origin such as Hasan, Osman and Mustafa became surnames with -oğlu ‘son of’: Hasanoğlu, Osmanoğlu. In these surnames only the father’s name is Arabic.

Mixed forms are common. Kalaycı ‘tinsmith’ joins kalay ‘tin’, a word of Arabic origin, to the Turkish agent suffix -cı. Kasapoğlu combines an Arabic occupational noun with Turkish -oğlu. For such surnames the site assigns the origin by the element that carries the meaning and shows each element separately.

The 1934 legislation touched this layer at two points. Law No. 2590 abolished titles and honorifics such as Hacı, Hafız, Molla and Efendi, several of them Arabic words. The Surname Regulation required new surnames to be taken from the Turkish language. Words like kasap, hekim and kâtip were part of Turkish by then and were used as surnames.

One feature of Arabic loans is that words from the same root form families. In Arabic, meaning usually sits in a root of three consonants, and vowels and affixes dress that root in different patterns. The root k-t-b means ‘to write’: kâtip ‘scribe’, kitap ‘book’ and mektup ‘letter’ all derive from it. The root ḥ-k-m yields both hekim ‘physician’ and hâkim ‘judge’. Turkish borrowed these words one by one, and a Turkish speaker may not connect them. The surname pages show such shared roots, which makes the link between forms like Hekim and Hâkim visible.

Origins follow reference works such as the TDK Güncel Türkçe Sözlük and the Nişanyan dictionary. An Arabic root tells the story of a word. It allows no conclusion about the people who carry the surname.