Radif, tuyuq and tajnis

The tuyuq is a purely Turkic lyric genre: it does not exist in Arabic and Persian literature. It formed under the influence of Turkic oral literature and later its rules became fixed in written literature. The tuyuq has four requirements: it must have four lines; it must rhyme aaaa or aaba, as in the ruboiy; it must be in the metre, that is the rhythmic pattern, called ramali musaddasi mahzuf (or maqsur); and the rhyming words must be tajnis. At first only the first three requirements existed; the fourth came later, and after that a tuyuq without tajnis could no longer be imagined. Tajnis is the use of words with the same form and different meanings. But it is not just an ordinary homonym: homonyms are same-form words fixed in the language, while for tajnis the poet can create one-time, original same-form combinations, for example “ul Oy”, “ul joy” and “uloy”. When tajnis is used as rhyme, the repetition of the words stands in for rhyme because their meanings differ.