Divan Edebiyatı Araştırmaları Dergisi

Abstract

In a traditional sense, elifnames (i.e., alphabet letters) can be defined as poems created by alphabetizing the first letters of the words at the beginning of verses, couplets, or passages from the first letter ‘elif’ to the last letter ‘ye’ in the Ottoman Turkish alphabet. In addition to various forms of verse in the classical poetry such as masnavi, kaside, gazel, murabba, muhammes, and musaddas, elifnames were also written in different forms of folk poetry. For instance, alphabetizing from ‘elif’ to ‘ye’ was sometimes reversed by alphabetizing from ‘ye’ to ‘elif’, sometimes the word indicated by the respective letter was not used as the first word but one of the subsequent words, in some cases, the letter is included while in other cases, the letter is not included but instead, the word starting with that letter was directly used while some poets used letters in the Arabic alphabet and others added the letters p, ç, and j, which originate from the Persian alphabet, in other cases, the letters were cross-alphabetized by taking one letter from the beginning (i.e., elif) and one letter from the end (i.e., ye) and so on; sometimes the meaning of the letters considered as a symbol was explained while in some cases, the abjad order was used instead of the order in the Arabic alphabet (in case of ebcetname or ‘abjad letters’), and sometimes the letters were placed at the end of the verse instead of at the beginning of the verse. The letters in two elifnames written by Bandırmalızade Haşim Baba (1130-1197 / 1718-1783) and discussed in this paper are at the end of the verses. While the order in the Arabic alphabet was used in one of the poems, the abjad order of the letters was adopted in the other poem.