Craft Of Commerce In Turkish Proverbs

As a cultural heritage from society’s history to today, proverbs embody components that constitute and shape social and economical life. In this context, the aim of this study is to reveal basic elements of the trade and commerce through proverbs include the life experiences of culture acquired in centuries-long time. In this study, craft of trade themed proverbs were obtained from four different proverb dictionaries by using some key words list and added to the data set. Then using document analysis as a qualitative research method, 109 obtained proverbs were classified to themes. Themes were named respectively as profit/loss, capital, business ethics, partnership, business management and tradesman features and when necessary are classified to subthemes and interpreted. As a result, it is observed that basic principles of trade are substantially preserved in Turkish proverbs which are folkloric products being an indicator for society’s attitudes and behavioral patterns, and correspond to a cultural item that has its own rituals. Considering sub-themes obtained from the study and relations between those sub-themes, the principles in question might be seen as cultural reflections which had the traces of this time period including Akhism tradition. In this respect, it might be said that important cultural and economic codes are transmitted to new generations by commerce-themed proverbs. Unlike we emphasize the competition dimension of commerce today; competition did not take part in proverbs and might be seen as a field differentiated from today’s commercial environment. This situation shows that proverbs are reflecting the fact of a period that production and ethics are more effective terms than competition and proverbs might be considered as key elements to understand the dynamics of any given period that these proverbs had been occurred. In brief, it might be said that commerce-themed proverbs are still leading the way for traders as they were in the past. In the study, commerce-themed proverbs were visualized by using word-cloud technique and notions that have high frequency were highlighted. From the word-cloud obtained from commerce-themed proverbs data set; ‘partner, money, profit, business, store, goods, day, year, capital’ words were stood out. There is no antecedent study on this subject and this constitutes the original value of the study.