Gaylañ gayıboldu.

[ufuk]

Hello people,

I wanted to share an etymologic discovery I made today.

First, we all know that "kaybolmak" means "to get lost" or "to be lost". The original form is kayıp olmak, and even earlier "gâib olmak". Gâib (غيب) means lost, hidden, disappeared in Arabic. Before Arabic, Turkish probably used "yitmek" instead of "kaybolmak"

So, in my grandmother's speech (She's from Sandıklı, Afyon) there is this usage, "Gaylañ gayıboldu." It means that something has gone missing permanently. I better give some explanation about the Sandıklı accent here- I'm not sure these would be valid for the wider region; but they probably would. Words that start with non-palatal K, that is <Ka->, <Kı->, <Ku->, <Ko-> become <Ga->, <Gı->, <Gu->, <Go->. The clitic ile is rendered as ileñ, sometimes ineñ - vowel harmony applies.

If you check gaip at tureng.com, it says defaulter first (it must be a legal term, I haven't peasonally heard that word being used in that meaning.), then the invisible world. So, gaip and kayıp are two words that virtually no speaker knows that they are actually the same. For everyone, gaip would mean the invisible world. It is mostly observed in the idiom "gaipten sesler duymak" (hearing non existent voices).

So, all of a sudden it appeared to me that "gaylañ gayıbolmak" is actually "gâib ile gâib olmak". It can be translated as "becoming lost with the lost". Also, "x ile x olmak" is a common phrase in Turkish e.g. çocukla çocuk olmak. I hope this is as interesting to you as it is to me!

[kalemiye]

It indeed was interesting, thank you for sharing!

-le in spoken Azerbaijani Turkish sounds like '-nen' actually