Mehmet TÜRKMEN*
SUMMARY
Language is the main element containing all other extensions of culture. Culture; is generally the main raw material of communities and civilizations. It is entellectual, moral, social, historically thematic and enthusiastic. It contains a private character and communities develop identity with their culture. Culture; develops its expression with national language and is kept alive with that language. It is protected with national language and transferred from generation to generation. All cultural extensions of traditional basis sports, such as art, literature and idea are born together with language and live especially in folk speech. Trying to summarize the most prominent orientations of Turkish culture, there cannot be found any other field more productive than traditional wrestling even today for that purpose. However, researching the wrestling from this aspect has not been considered worthy to be an object of an academical work.
This work aspires to study wrestling and synonymous concepts in Turkish world; to explain that these concepts contain motivated functionality with language in their cultural structures, at which level and how they perceive wrestling format and keep it alive within proverbs and sayings. In this work historical and scanning method are used; and also linguistics, syntax, semantics and terminological technics are utilized. Since any monographic research is not found regarding this subject, some bounding works are partly taken into consideration, much rather contemporary researchers about Turkistan and also historical-basic books written in the same geography are utilized.
In the work it is appeared that the concept of wrestling “güreş”(kür+eş) is in conformity with its own activity in the aspects of semantics and syntax within Turkish language. The wrestler (pehlivan) title is found as an organizational, functional and model personality having a lot of goodness and heroism rather than a sports format. As a result, in this respect wrestling and wrestler are richly reflected into Turkish culture to Anatolia from Siberia together with language elements and perceived so.
Key words: CONCEPTS OF “WRESTLING–WRESTLER” WITHIN THE CULTURE OF TURKISH WORLD
*Asst. Prof. Dr., Yaşar Doğu Higher Education School of Physical Education and Sports,19 Mayıs University, Samsun. mturkmen@omu.edu.tr
