Language Barrier

So I haven’t had a chance to take a class in Turkish yet, although I am looking forward to starting soon. For now I fiddle around with Rosetta Stone, pick up phrases here and there - survival Turkish - and try out new words on my housekeeper and the building guards. That usually gets me a smile.

It’s just that Turkish is just so vastly different from the other languages that I’ve studied. It will be my fourth - not counting English or the bit of Russian I took in high school - and I just have to wrap my head around the concept and dive in. Nouns have no gender (Bonus!), there is no definite article (which can make you sound like Tarzan), you pronounce every letter (hard to remember after French), the verb always comes last (can you IMAGINE being a simultaneous interpreter, and having to wait until the end for the verb?) and Turkish grammar has very few exceptions.

Actually Turkish used to be written in Arabic script, but as part of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk’s cultural reforms in 1928, the script was replaced by the Latin alphabet, and at the same time, many Persian and Arabic loanwords were removed and replaced by French words or new words derived from Turkic roots. (Some people consider this one of the greatest cultural tragedies, to remove a people from their linguistic roots, although I think they are well-meaning foreigners and not necessarily the Turks themselves. I have no comment on that whatsoever, only to say that if he hadn’t, there wouldn’t be a prayer that I’d be functionally literate by the time I left Turkey.) Anyway, every once in a while I can understand a Turkish word because it sounds exactly like the French equivalent, even if they are spelled very differently. I was also amused to find that the Turkish word for lion is Aslan. Yes, Mr. Lewis did visit the Ottoman Empire during his lifetime. There’s a tidbit for your next cocktail party.

I guess what intimidates me a bit is that Turkish is an agglutinative language (like Finnish and Japanese, two language noted for their ease of mastery by Anglophones. NOT.), which linguistically means that you keep adding suffixes to express possession, negation, tense and potential, etc, but in real terms means that you can get endless words that make German compound nouns look short. Thus the phrase “You will be able to come” is a single word, gelebileceksin. Gel (to come) ebil (to be able to) ecek (will) and sin (you). In fact, supposedly (ah, supposedly - what one can get away with on a blog, no fact checking needed) the Guinness Book of World Records lists the world’s longest word as the Turkish word,

Çekoslovakyalılaştırabilemediklerimizlerdenmissiniz,

which loosely translates as “Maybe you are one of those who we were not able to Czechoslovakianize” That’s an extraordinarily useful phrase that this struggling native English speaker plans to use at her earliest opportunity.
The longest word in the Turkish Language Foundation’s dictionary (official regulator of the Turkish language) is elektroansefalografi (electroencephalography) and if you apply the maximum number of suffixes, you get:
Elektroansefalografililestiremeyebileceklerimizdenmissiniz,
or “Apparently you may be amongst the ones that we will not be able to make have an electroencephalography.” I am going to commit that one to memory just in case I become a Turkish doctor.

And to THINK that I complained about high school Russian…

But unfortunately for my linguistic education and cultural sensitivity, the Turks make it easy to slide by on survival Turkish. Not because many of them speak English - some do of course - but because they are so NICE. They will go out of their way to help you, especially if you attempt even a word or two of Turkish, and even if you don’t. They smile and encourage, offer you their few words of English, serve you tea, and then everyone is old friends, and we all laugh, even if no one understands each other.

What a concept – patience with foreigners. Oh Toto, we are not in France anymore.