Sorry for the following little off-topic'ish reply:
Hello ancalimon,
beter like many other words in Turkish is taken from Persian, that is an IE word.
bad=>bad
badtar=> worse
badtarin=> the worst
I think there is a tendency to change most of 'a' to 'e' in Turkey Turkish, so ben is also an Persian word in origin
man=> I (in Azari Turkish I is man also)
Dear darush,
please allow me to correct as far as I believe to know:
"
من" ("
I") in Persian is actually a
borrowing from a Turkic language.
Turkish "
ben" and its related words in other Turkic languages (
män, mən, bən, beng, ...) derive from Proto-Turkic *
meŋ
This is in accordance with every suffix of the 1st person starting with -m(-). There is also an Old Turkic Orkhon-inscription of the 8th century, which starts with "Bilge Tonyuquq
ben..."
Moving on, the Persian language is an Indo-Aryan language. The word "
I" probably was in PIE *
éǵh₂ (Latin → ego; German → ich; Anglo-Saxon → *ih/*ic; ...).
The palatovelar
ǵ in the satem languages (Persian, Kurdish, Avestian,...) changed into an alveolar fricative (
ǵ → z).
We can see such a word in the Kurdish language:
"ez" means "I"
I assume, that Persian **az interfered with
از (az), meaning"from". So they borrowed, due to the nearness, the Azəri word for "I", that is "mən".