# lütfu



## kmaro

_Would you help me wıth thıs sentence_

_Cenabıhakk'ın *lütfuyla *bu büyük badireden sağ çıktık._

_Teşekkür ederim_


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## Chazzwozzer

Cenabıhakk'ın lütfuyla bu büyük badireden sağ çıktık._
*We've pulled through this great calamity by the grace of the Supreme Being.

*_*lütuf: *grace _(religious term) _(cf. lütfu [lütuf-u -> lütfu])
*badire:* calamity _(badire is an fairly archaic word)_


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## elroy

Surely you mean "grace"?

This word must come from Arabic - the Arabic word لطف (_lutf_) means "kindness."


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## Chazzwozzer

Don't know how I could make the same typo twice in one post.  _Corrected glace to grace._

Most of the words appearing in religious context are of Arabic origin. Cenabıhakk and badire also ring bells to you, don't they?

By the way, just to make it sure, I'd like to hear a Turkish-speaking Muslim's opinion whether they use this term exactly how grace means in English. _(The sentence seems to be written by a religous Muslim.)_


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## elroy

Chazzwozzer said:


> Most of the words appearing in religious context are of Arabic origin. Cenabıhakk and badire also ring bell to you, don't they?


 What does _cenabıhakk_ mean?  As for _badire_, I can't think of an Arabic word that's similar and means something like "calamity."  There's بلية, _baliyya_, but that's not similar enough.


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## Chazzwozzer

*Cenabıhak *(cena:bıhak) _(double k occurs if a suffix is added in Turkish) _may be written as Cenab-ı Hakk in Arabic. It means Allah, you know, "the Supreme Being"

*Badire *(ba:dire) may also mean something like problem, gloom etc. in Arabic.
*
cenabıhak:* cen¥b + §a®®
*badire:* b¥dire
So it's how TDK transliterates their origins, not that I understand their standards but you may know what those symbols should mean.


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## Spectre scolaire

Cenabı Hak simply means ”God” (as _Chazzwozzer_ correctly says) – in a rather elevated style that is, not generally known among secular Turks. The construction itself is archaic; today, the so-called _Persian izafet_, a way of making compound nouns opposite of the procedure in Turkish, is only found in linguistically frozen expressions and is not productive. _Cenabı Hak_ most probably came through Persian although both words are of Arabic origin. Arab. [djani:b], “stranger”, belongs to the same root, while _hak_ is a very common word in Turkish.

As _elroy_ correctly points out, “lütfu” is Arabic – in fact, the word is rather _lûtuf_, _lûtfu_ when a possessive pronoun is added, as in this case because the Persian izafet together with the noun _lûtuf_ makes up a _Turkish_ izafet, and –la, “with”, is eventually added. In Turkish izafets the qualifying word (the _determinans_) is put in the genitive, _hak_ receives a double _k_ in oblique forms (the result corresponding to original Arabic [haqq], h with a _punctum subscriptum_), and the apostrophe in _Cenabı Hakk’ın_ indicates that _Cenabı Hak_ is considered to be a name.

I remember some years ago I heard a man calling somebody Lûtfullah, I turned around and saw a boy of about 10 years of age. This is a very unusual name to give a Turkish child today. The family almost certainly came from somewhere east in the country – like in Italy, the name Salvatore would _never_ be given to a child in the north of the country (except if the family was _di origine meridionale_).

The last word, _badire_, must have come through Persian as well and “suffered” a semantic modification. (I don’t have my Steingass: _Persian dictionary_ with me here). The Arabic root is in fact b-d-r; [ba:dir] is “full moon” in Arabic. The word _badire_ should be considered as Ottoman Turkish; “nobody” knows it today.

According to the American arabist Charles Ferguson, “an Arabic word can mean one thing or the opposite or a sort of a camel”... Ferguson only describes _elroy_s bewilderment, but it is not his fault. Arabic is semantically a very confusing language. With the impact of Persian and Ottoman mediation of Arabic, together with the synchronic and diachronic aspect of it, i.e. modern dialects and Classical Arabic respectively, all entering into a rather shadowy mishmash, it becomes outright impossible to know what things actually mean.


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