Abstract
The tradition and method of giving names to children differ from nation to nation. In the Turkish culture, since the name of a person is related to his/her fate, the selection of names has been done with care. The political and religious changes experienced by the Turkmen Turks in the historical process have affected their names. It is possible to understand the reflections of Turkish culture, the beliefs in Central Asia, the influence of Islam and the Soviet pressure, and follow sociological changes via them. In this study about people’s names in Turkmen Turkish, it has been found that 901 of the 7000 names were derived from verbs. 76 of these are female names and 29 of them are used for both boys and girls. The number of verb names given to boys is 796. It is seen that some derivational affixes, especially participle suffixes, in Turkish are also used in the derivation of people’s names. In this study, a total of 23 forms were found out of which ten were derivational affixes, nine were verbal nouns and four were modal verbs.