Saturday, August 25, 2012

More fun with dictionaries - tay-tuş

Alef's comment has sent me off to the dictionary yet again. I am intrigued by this word tay-tuş, which I have never heard before. This means equal or a match, as Alef said. The sample sentence in the dictionary is Onlar sənin tay-tuşun deyil. They are not your equal. I looked up both tay and tuş. Tay by itself means bale or package, as in bir tay pambıq - a bale of cotton. It also means a part of a pair - ayaqqabının tayı - and equal or match. Tuş means well-aimed or accurate.


Taya means a stack. As in, ot tayası - haystack. Does this only apply to hay, or can you have a stack of books? Or a stack of money? Or a stack of chairs? Thanks to Samir, we now know - You can't say these things. It doesn't make sense!

One who makes a haystack is a tayavuran. But strangely, there is a phrase taybatay açmaq - to throw open, as with a window - Külək pəncərəni taybatay açdı - The wind blew open the window.

Questions about həm-

Hello everyone, what few there may be... Back after a wonderful trip to the Qabala Music Festival. Extraordinary place, extraordinary event. And everyone was very friendly and helpful. They were especially patient speaking Azerbaijani to me. I'm really grateful.

However, now I'm back in Baku and have to buckle down to studying Azerbaijani again. So... I return to find a comment from my scholarly online friend Alef. He gave a detailed and very interesting explanation of different prefixes in Azerbaijani and which languages they come from. And YES - anyone! - I am still looking for an etymological dictionary of Azerbaijani...

Now to the topic at hand: the prefix həm-. Alef says that some are not correct or are archaic. However, they are all taken from my red dictionary (Editor-in-chief is Prof. O. I. Musayev). I thought that this was the gold standard for businesses in Azerbaijan. Perhaps there is a more recent dictionary that gives more common usages? Anyway, all advice appreciated.

I'll now move on to another posting. I wonder what my topic will be...