Abstract:

The names of places are one of the most important alive documents in the history of a nation. The name given to a place bears traces of the nations that make the place their homeland. There is a strong relationship between the thoughts and feelings of people and the name of the places.  The field investigating the names of places with respect to meaning, root and structure is called “toponymy”. The names of villages, cities and natural whereabouts are all taken into consideration in toponyms. Toponym can be divided into two categories as macrotoponymy and microtonymy according to the size of the object they refer to. Microtoponyms which were transmitted by word of mouth to the next generations and reached to these days, are the names of places that are just used by the residents of that geography in natural settings and not stated even in 1/100.000 scale maps. Microtoponymics is quite important to detect language richness of that region. One of the factors that are used in assigning place names in Turkish is plant cover. In this article, investigating the microtoponyms of villages in Yerköy, place names originated from plant names are dealt with. The intensity of plants used in place names are stated. By determining the intensity of the use of plants in naming places, attention will be drawn to the relationship between climate and vegetation.  Interesting factors in assigning place names have also been identified. Today, we can only see these factors in the Compilation Dictionary and identification of them will contribute to linguistics.

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