PHILOSOPHY OF LANGUAGE AT YUNUS EMRE

Abstract

The history of Philosophy of Language goes back to the 17th century at most. We know that there were philosophical thoughts and discussions on language in the Ancient Ages and the Middle Ages. However, the history of studies on language as a branch of philosophy is very new. However, the philosophy of language has taken its place among the other disciplines of science and philosophy, which actually existed as a field of science or philosophy in the historical process and were named later. Yunus Emre did not directly put forward the philosophy or theory of language in this respect. Moreover, it would be premature for the 14th century in which he lived to say that he built a systematic and categorical system of philosophical thought. But if there is something that is not premature, it is the language, culture, meaning and propositions in the Turkish language that Yunus Emre uses in his poems, which are directly related to the philosophy of language that we have been discussing for 300 years. We see that he establishes a word-meaning relationship based on an unnamed epistemological and ontological basis. The linguistic studies of grammar, which is the subject of the studies of linguists and men of letters, about how Yunus used Turkish with great sensitivity and mastery seem to have been completed to a large extent. At least, we can learn from such studies how Yunus’s Turkish and his ability to use Turkish are reflected in his poems. However, in these studies, the intense attention to how the power of Turkish as a language is reflected in Yunus Emre’s poems has ignored the language-meaning relationship.