ABOUT THE FIRST TURKISH HONONYMS DICTIONARY: LİSANIMIZDA ELFAZ-I MÜTEŞABİHE (1924)

Homonyms (homophones) are the words that spellings and pronunciations are the same and not related to each other in terms of their meanings and functions. As in every language, homonyms are encountered in Turkish since ancient times: boy, dal, don, ög, tüy, yaş, yüz etc. Homonyms have different causes in Turkish : 1) sound changes, 2) polysemy, 3) borrowing. Despite a very common phenomenon in Turkish, the number of studies on homonyms is not as high as one might expect; neat, academic homophone dictionary is nor available yet. In Turkey, at the first years of the Republic, a detached homonyms dictionary was printed twice about it before the transition to the Latin alphabet. In this dictionary, which is published in the Arabic alphabet, has important points such as given examples, abbreviations in lexical entry and a rich vowel point system there are 1428 headings of Turkish, Arabic, Persian, Greek, Italian, French, English and German origin. In this article, it will be tried to identify the successful and unsuccessful aspects and the principles that the author takes into consideration while preparing the dictionary after the work is introduced in line with the principles of lexicography. Also, the deficiencies detected in the dictionary as per item and to make sense of it will be shared with the reader. In addition the status of “homophones that are not spelled the same” that contains different Arabic sounds; words by long or short vowel; proper nouns and common nouns; in terms of homophonic criteria that is determined to be considered / followed while preparing the dictionary, information will be given.