Xātun

Xātun

It is evident that after the Turks settled in Anatolia and launched attacks on various regions of the world, particularly Iranian regions, they carried out destructive and incendiary conquests. Over five hundred years of incursions into different parts of the world and Asia, including Iran, they captured and occupied regions, districts, and countries and imposed the names of their own centres and regions upon them. The word xātun accompanied these Turkish incursions, but its original owner was Sogdian, an extinct language now represented only rarely among speakers in regions of China, especially the Uyghur area. Like many widely used ancient words of the Iranian languages, it underwent phonemic assimilation and was appropriated as Turkic. In Iranian Sogdian, xātun appears as x'twnh, xttwnh, x'twnh, xwat'yn, meaning queen, the wife of a leader or ruler, or a noblewoman. Through the consonantal change of /x/ to /q/, a pharyngeal phone associated etymologically with Turkic and the Ural-Altaic languages, it took forms such as qādïn, kadın, qādun, qadin. The word qedun, qudun, qıdon, qādon still occurs in Turkic with the meanings leader, pioneer, or elder. It entered Ottoman Turkish, Uzbek, Uyghur, and Azerbaijani, all of which generally use xātun for a senior woman or as an honorific for women. Etymologically, xātun derives from the Avestan and Sanskrit bases hān and hīn, meaning owner or possessor, themselves adopted from Indo-European senh. Through the phonemic change of /h/ to /x/, it took the form xān, which Turkish rulers often used in the expanded form xāqān. The same base underwent assimilation in words such as hātuna and xātun, following a common pattern in ancient Iranian languages: hōr/xōr, hurşîd/xurşîd, surx/surh, tahm/taxm, xwāru/hwāru, and so forth. This indicates that the Turks borrowed the word from Sogdian and derived xān, xānim, xātun from it. When xān is used for a girl or woman in Kurdish, it is often claimed that the term is inappropriate for women and belongs only to men. This reflects the dominance of gendered thought from Arabic over Kurdish. Yet xān means owner or possessor and is used as an honorific for both sexes.

The Turks used the Sanskrit senh/san as Hān and, through the change of /h/ to /x/, as xān. In Avestan, the suffix -un/-wn conveys wealth and ornamentation. The word hāt became the base of hātuna and hātika. The word hīn remains widespread in Kurdish languages with the meanings owner, possessor, for, or belonging to, as in “ئەمە هین من و ئەمەش هین تۆ” and “ئەمە هین منە,” meaning “this belongs to me; I own this.” With deletion of the phone /n/, it is now used as î or hî. Through assimilation of /h/ to /x/, the word remains in the form xātun, xātuna. Sogdian applied this assimilation more extensively to the base hān, because the change of /h/ to /x/ was common in the Iranian languages rather than Turkic. Following the Turkish incursions, this word, like customs, culture, language, regions, districts, villages, and cities, was appropriated and treated as Turkic. In the writings of peoples neighbouring the Turks, it was presented and circulated as Turkish. Research into the extinct Sogdian language, however, revealed its Iranian foundation and showed that Turkic had claimed it as its own. In Kurdish, an interpretation also appears that derives it from the two words xā and tun, but this is merely a Kurdish dictionary interpretation and is not foundational.

Source: Avashin Kurdish Etymological Dictionary

Sabir Zhakaw

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