Między rzeczywistością i wyobrażeniem. Rola toponimów w przysłowiach tureckich

Proverbs are the shortest literary text containing clues and warnings, so they can be treated as a compendium of naive knowledge of world, whereas they are a valuable source of information for different researchers like linguists or culturists. As a product of oral / folk literature, proverb presents a naive, "unlettered", sometimes mythologized knowledge of everything that was / is important to a given community. The emergence of specific words, concepts or own names in the proverbs demonstrates that these non-linguistic elements were/ still are relevant to the users of a given language. This work is dedicated to the place names appearing in the proverbs. In most cases, they are names of places relevant for geographical location, trade relations and religious life of the Turks. The territorial spread of the Ottoman Empire did not prevent news of conquest and life "somewhere else" from reaching the illiterate and unenlightened inhabitants through communication and commercial routes. And they, on the basis of the hearings of merchants and pilgrims, attributed real or exaggerated values to the real places and made them existed in the proverbs. While Istanbul, the capital of the vast Empire, can be considered as a center of science and knowledge, Anatolia inhabited by uneducated Sultan subordinates can be considered as a center of oral literature, including proverbs of the "great world". This literature, that has not saturated with knowledge or vocabulary of scholars, has kept apart from purely linguistic values and qualities, a view of the geography of the surrounding world.