Persian Loanwords in Turkish

[u/TurkishTeacherSeda]

Turkish is Turkic, Persian is Indo-European, and yet Turkish absorbed a large layer of Persian vocabulary over centuries of contact, mostly through Ottoman administration, poetry, and religious life. Some of it is everyday and invisible now (can for soul/life, ateş for fire, düşman for enemy), and some stayed more literary (derya for sea instead of the everyday deniz, cihan for world instead of dünya). One I found genuinely interesting: rüzgâr (wind) meant "time" or "period" in Persian, and the wind meaning only took over in Turkish by the 16th century, a real semantic shift rather than a straightforward borrowing.

I teach Turkish and write about language history at learnturkishwithseda.com if this kind of thing interests you.

[u/ReelBigMidget]

Can düșman be used to mean rival or opponent then, rather than enemy? Depending on context?

[u/TurkishTeacherSeda → u/ReelBigMidget]

Usually no. Düşman means enemy and implies real hostility. For a rival or opponent, we normally use rakip. Turkish can actually make düşman even stronger with can düşmanı, meaning a bitter or mortal enemy. So I wouldn’t use düşman as a neutral equivalent of “rival” or “opponent.”

[u/ReelBigMidget → u/TurkishTeacherSeda]

Ah, OK. I was wondering because the post said it's used in sport and politics. Using enemy in English would be very extreme in those contexts.

[u/qTLDreamer → u/ReelBigMidget]

Actually no. The phrase "can düşmanı" means literally a mortal enemy. It is used when there is a seriuous animosity between two people or groups but you need to conjugate according to the plurality. A few examples are below 👇🏻

Onlar birbirlerinin can düşmanlarıydı.
They were mortal enemies of each other.

O, şu andan itibaren (or "an itibarıyla") benim can düşmanımdır.
S/he is my mortal enemy as of now.

İki aile birbirini can düşmanı olarak görüyordu.
The two families were looking at each other as mortal enemies.

In the last example, we had to specify the plurality by adding plural suffix "-s" in English but we don't have to specify the plurality in Turkish specifically even if it can be also used as birbirlerini can düşmanları olarak. We can liken this to the omission of plural suffixes (-lar / -ler) when other words in the sentence already make the plurality clear.

[u/LiteratureNo244]

Didn't know about Derya, it's gonna come in handy

[u/momoali313]

Wrong. Dari is what you should’ve wrote. Dari is a Farsi dialect older than Persian.