Bakı

Azerbaijani

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Bakı

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Etymology

Baku is long attested under the Perso-Arabic name باکو (Bākū). Early Arabic sources also refer to the city as Bākuh and Bākuya, all of which seem to come from a Persian name. Further etymology is unknown.

A popular etymology in the 19th century considered it to be derived from Persian بادکوبه (bâd-kube, “wind-pounded”), compound of باد (bâd) + کوب (kub) + ـه (-e). This etymology was first proposed in the 17th century-chronicle Tārīkh-i ʕālam-ārā-yi ʕabbāsī.

Another and even less probable folk etymology explains the name as deriving from Baghkuy, from Middle Persian (*bgkwdk' /⁠*baykōyōē, *bakkōyōē⁠/) compound of (bg /⁠bay, bag⁠/, “God; lord”) + (kwd /⁠kōy⁠/, “street, lane”) + (-wyk' /⁠-ōē⁠/), meaning "God's town". The name Baghkuy may be compared with Baghdād ("God-given") in which dād is the Old Persian word for "give".

During Soviet rule, the city was spelled in Cyrillic as Бакы in Azerbaijani (while the Russian spelling was and still is Баку́ (Bakú)). The modern Azerbaijani spelling, which has been using the Latin alphabet since 1991, is Bakı; the shift from the Perso-Arabic letter و (ū) to Cyrillic ы and, later, Latin ı may be compared to that in other Azerbaijani words (e.g. compare قاپو (qāpū) in old Perso-Arabic spelling with modern Azerbaijani qapı (“door”)) or in suffixes, as و was often used to transcribe the vowel harmony in Azerbaijani (which was also the practice in Ottoman Turkish).

Pronunciation

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Proper noun

Bakı

1. Baku (the capital city of Azerbaijan)

Declension

Derived terms

• bakılı (“Bakuvian”)

References

Further reading

• Baku on Wikipedia.Wikipedia