Apparu!

The childhood days are over, and they are the makers of their destiny, the group with this cheerful song Yantash greet their parents, friends and the whole of the Chuvashnation. In Turkic Lyrics we analyzed just exactly what they meant and how Turkic it is.

Vladimir Rybkin wrote the song’s lyrics, and popular song composer Anatoliy Nikitin created the music. The song, which was released a decade ago, has a distinct regional flavor, but is also well-known among our Turkic viewers, who asked for it to be included.

Despite the seemingly incomprehensible phonetic discrepancies, the structure of the Chuvash text translates to Turkish without any difficulty.

• Some cognates are so ridiculously estranged, they amuse instead of conveying meaning. hyş ‘behind’ — kıç ‘ass, butt’, şut ‘bright’ — yakıt ‘fuel’, tăvan ‘sibling, relative’ — doğan ‘born’ (but as a noun it’s homonymous with ‘hawk, falcon’), šuhăš ‘idea, intention’ — sakınca ‘objection, drawback’.
• Other cognates got antiquated, obscured by discourse, or fell out of usage: • juratma- ‘to love’ — yaratmak- ‘to create’ (the link between the meanings was culturally obscured), • pit ‘face’ — bet ‘face’ (antiquated, only used in compound ‘bet beniz’).
• Both languages are somewhat at a distance from the Turkic core. Some elements are found in Chuvash, and are not in Turkish: • acalăh is very similar to Turkmen çagalyk, • upra- ‘save, store’ is related to Koman abra- ‘protect’, and Karaim abra- ‘save, protect’, • talăk ‘cycle, 24 hours’ is perhaps a borrowing from Kipchak languages (Kazakh тәулік, Tatar täülek, Bashkir täwlek.
• • Words of intention “šuhăš, ĕmĕt” and respect “salamla-“, “puş taj-” are somewhat more casual in Chuvash, whereas in Turkish “niyet, ümit”, “selam ver-“, “baş eğ-” are quite solemn.

This light-hearted ode to parents and homeland resonates strongly in Turkish and perhaps other Turkic languages. Closer analysis reveals layers of meaning and usage that have been lost or altered by culture, leading us even to rather enigmatic Turkic languages like Karaim.

Watch the video below, and let us know if you find something even more striking!

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