“Çinçavat” is a word used especially in the areas of Kars, Iğdır, Ardahan
and Artvin in Turkey, which means several negative denotations
such as “ill-tempered, stingy, selfish, quarrelsome, spoilsport, incompatible,
impudent, filthy, gossiper”. Not only in Turkey and in Turkish,
this word is used with similar meanings especially in Armenian but
also in Azerbaijani and Georgian languages. It can be traced since the
17th century that within the Çıldır-Iğdır territory, the nomad population
uses this pejorative term for the people who have a settled village life
basically engaged in growing fruits and vegetables. We find this word
being used as village names in Iğdır-Çıldır region in Turkey and also in
the Vedi valley of Armenia.
M. Fahrettin Kırzıoğlu, who’s known for his pretentious works
about this region and its history, claims that the Çinçavats are Kipchak
Turks who settled in the area even before 1071. He also divides the
word into two part as “Çin+Çavat” by associating the first part “Çin”
to China. Furthermore, by relating the second part to Cavak (Cavax)
Kırzıoğlu claims that the t and k endings are suffixes that make the
word plural. Finally, Kırzıoğlu explained this word as “Çin-Çav-s”,
which means the people coming from China. He connected “Çav” to
“Çavuldur”, or “Çavdar-Tatars”, a tribe of Tatar Turks. This suggestion
by Kırzıoğlu has been accepted by most historians and researchers and
has been taken as a proof of the Turkish presence in the region before
1071. Yet, this suggestion of his is clearly a folk etymology.
The word Çinçavat is borrowed from Armenian. In Armenian this
word - čʿnčʿahavat չնչահավատ- means “non-believer, faithless” and
besides having various forms of local pronunciation, there exists a direct
-čʿinčʿavat չինչավատ- form. This Armenian word is composed
of čʿnčʿ- and havat parts. čʿnčʿ- is a form of privative prefix, while
havat հավատ means “faith, belief, creed; trust, confidence; fidelity,
faithfulness, good faith, sincerity; proof, testimony, evidence”. This
word, which originally meant “faithless” adopted different meanings such as “stingy, selfish, impudent, filthy etc.”, as commonly found in
Turkish local dialect studies, because it is also used as an ethnonym.
Çinçavates Javakhes Çıldır Kars Iğdır Armenian loanwords ethnonym
Primary Language | Turkish |
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Journal Section | Research Article |
Authors | |
Publication Date | June 1, 2019 |
Published in Issue | Year 2019 Issue: 67 |