6 Things You Will Come To Notice About The Turkish Language, In Order From Low-Brow to High-Brow
that last post was heavy going, need something lighter...I know! a listicle!
As far as I remember, watching Diriliş: Ertuğrul was the first time I ever heard spoken Turkish. I had never planned to learn the language, but after the first episode I was googling “Selcan Hatun” to find out how that ‘c’ was pronounced, and whether “Hatun” was her surname or some sort of title; next thing I knew, I was downloading language apps. Two years later, I’ve recently had the new experience of knowing the Turkish word for something, while being unable to remember the English word.1 To celebrate this dubious milestone, here are some observations from along the way. These are roughly in chronological order, but more importantly they progress from crude to cultured; from potty-mouth to poetry.
1. Words that sounds rude but aren’t
Some of the first syllables that really jump out when listening to an unfamiliar language are those that sound like swear-words in your native tongue. Apparently taboo words trigger the threat-detection systems in your brain, making them super easy to spot compared to normal syllables which don’t have that extra layer of emotion attached.
The best and funniest example I have from Turkish is the adjective used to describe something standing up straight or perpendicular, which is “dik”. For extra chuckle points we can use it in the phrase “to stare straight ahead”, which is the snappy staccato “dik dik bakmak”.
The letter “k” is much more commonly used in Turkish than in English, so syllables like “dik” and “fak” that can be parsed as swears by English speakers are frequently encountered. Watching Diriliş: Ertuğrul you’ll notice words like “ittifak” (“alliance”) standing out from the background. Two further examples are “Fakih”, which comes from an Arabic word for an Islamic scholar, and “fakir” meaning a poor person, which are easily parsed as “fucker” by my ignorant English-speaking ears. Here’s an example (Diriliş: Ertuğrul S01E03, timestamp 6:05) if you want to test yourself:
If you want to learn to swear in Turkish, then Diriliş: Ertuğrul is not going to help; the vocabulary is very family-friendly. There is something to be said for encountering swear-words at some stage during your language education: it will stop you from accidentally saying these words in public when you don’t mean to. A couple of suggestions for your homework list:
This paper which features examples of Turkish swears from a film, including the fascinating and difficult-to-translate word “ulan”.
This post from Language Log on a famous example of a failure to localise mobile phones.
2. Look at all those dots
One unique aspect of Turkic languages is the concept of “vowel harmony”. Turkish is an agglutinative language, which means words are built up from little chunks stuck together. “Söz” means “word”; then “sözlük” means a “word-container” (a dictionary), and “sözlükçü” then means “word-container-professional” (a lexicographer), and “sözlükçülük” is “word-container-professional-ness” (lexicography). I have contrived this example to illustrate vowel harmony, where the vowels in the later syllables that you glue on to the end of a word tend to match the final vowel of the previous syllable. In practice this can lead, as in the example, to words with long strings of double dots.
This is by far my favourite thing about Turkish. As the band Motörhead correctly point out, the more dots you have, the more Metal you are. Even the phonology of Turkish seems especially suited for Metal singing (more on this in the next section). Here is a song from my favourite Turkish metal band, Murder King. The name of the album is "Gürültü Kirliliği" (“noise pollution”) because of course it is.
As per the Youtube comments the song features one particularly succinct piece of political commentary (starts at 0:44 seconds), noteworthy both for its poetic rhythm and the courage needed to express it publicly:
Bizim ampül gelir aşka oynar götü başı her gün başka
Now translating song lyrics is hard at the best of times, and there is no way I will get all the nuances of this, but lets try to correct Google’s mangled attempt:
Our light bulb comes to love, and his ass head is different every day
The first thing to note is that the “ampül” or lightbulb is the symbol of Turkish President Erdoğan’s Justice and Development Party (AKP), who are the target of the criticism. I get the sense that “coming to love” is like if a stranger stalked you in the street and gave you flowers: effective in the movies, but terrifying in real life. Then the second half of the line seems to be about confusion or lack of coordination: “every day his arse and his head do different things” (I’ve localised the word “ass” to Australian English, obviously). When the line above is repeated later in the song (at 1:41), the “oynar götü başı” is replaced with “sallar sağa sola” (“shakes to the right, to the left”). Given this, I am tempted to add a dance idiom when putting it all together, like so:
“The AKP is desperate to be loved, but its arse and its head aren’t twerking to the same tune”
(I’m sure this is at least as offensive as the original, even if I’ve got the translation wrong…)
3. Those whistled “R”s, and other fun sounds
Continuing with the rude-word pattern recognition for a moment: listen to these Turkish people pronounce the word “peynir” (“cheese”). If you heard “penis” you’re not alone. (I assure you we are going more high-brow soon). That voiceless ‘r’ at the end of a word seems to be a pretty distinctive part of the Turkish accent. Since the word for cheese came into Turkish via Persian, I wondered if the the voiceless ‘r’ did too; this Persian speaker has it, but of the three pronunciations on Forvo, only Ottoman Turkish has the whistle, so maybe not. If you didn’t make the connection “peynir” = “paneer” then you probably twigged on hearing the Urdu version.
My high-school had only offered Latin-derived languages (French and Italian), and so I quickly realised Turkish had a much different flow to these. I frequently get tongue-twisted in a way I haven’t experienced with other languages: common words like “su şişesi” (“water bottle”; click that link to hear it) are very “she sells sea shells” for me. Longer words often have a string of d/l/r syllables that my tongue easily loses track of; see for example “sürdürülebilir” (“sustainable”; another nice example of a whistled “r” at that link).
So what is it that makes Turkish so good for Metal? I think its the abundance of “ch” and “sh” sounds compared to English, that can give the language a “crash, smash” onomatopoeia at times. With the novelty of this to play with, there are certain words in Turkish that I just love to hear and pronounce. Here’s a list:
UK English speakers might know the word “bosh” meaning “nonsense, empty or meaningless words”. This word means “empty; unoccupied” in Turkish, where it is spelled “boş”.
A “slam dunk” in basketball is “smaç” (pronounced like “much” but with an “s” on the front). Maybe its onomatopoeic? It feels great to say, anyway.
I can’t mention onomatopoeia without listing “düdük” for a referee’s whistle, and “gargara” for mouthwash.
The words “büyük” and “küçük” (“big” and “small” respectively) sound great, but I particularly like how they remind me of the Bouba/kiki Effect: “büyük” just sounds big and bulbous to me, while “küçük” is little and cute.
The dotless “ı” is another novelty that I love. Listen to words like “trafik sıkışıklığı” ("traffic jam"), or “karıştırıcı” (“kitchen blender”). That last one makes a simple machine sound positively ominous.
An honourable mention for “satranç” (“chess”) since I know its a loanword from Persian or Arabic, but this is another word that feels great to say. So crunchy in your mouth…
Once you’ve been watching Turkish TV for a while, you’ll start to recognise whole words, not just sounds. Here are a few:
Some of the conjunctions often appear at the start of a sentence with a pause after them, which meakes them easy to spot as isolated words. See “ama” (“but”); “ancak” (“however”); and the deliberately archaic “ye olde” sounding “lâkin”. This word also means “but”; apparently correctly used when you want to say “something positive but something negative”, but overused in historical dramas to the point of annoying some viewers.
The syllables used when talking about the future "(“-ecek/-acak”) get interpreted by English speaking brains in an interesting way. This is best illustrated with the word “dayanacaksın”, which means “you will endure; hold on”, often said in TV shows to someone with an arrow sticking out of them while they wait for medical care. This word sounds to an English speaker like the name “Diana Jackson”, and speaking about the future in Turkish can sound a bit like “Jackson” this and “Jackson” that.
Turkish might not be as complicated as some Asian languages when it comes to titles of respect for your family members, but its more complicated than English. There are distinct words for “older brother” and “older sister”, maternal/paternal aunts and uncles, and so on. Probably best if I do a full post on these some time, but here are the first ones you might notice: “ağabey” (“older brother”; often shortened to “abi” in internet comments); “Ana” (ye olde word for “mother” vs modern “anne”); “Baba” (“father”); “Ata” (“father/elder/ancestor”).
The religious words! “İnşallah/maşallah/eyvallah/bismillah/çok şükür”, you will grow to love all of these and wish that English had them. Some definitions here.
You can of course enjoy listening to Turkish TV without understanding it, but its better with subtitles (see my guide). For the ultimate example of listening without understanding, try “kuş dili” (“bird language”); the whistled language still practiced across some mountainous areas of Turkey. Apparently it preserves the full grammatical structure of spoken Turkish:
4. The same and the different
Let’s take a step up now from sound to meaning. One thing I find fascinating about other languages, is when they choose to name something following exactly the same logic that we chose in English, versus when their choice of names followed a different path.
For an example of the first, the English word “planet” comes from the Greek for “wanderer”, because of the way that planets move erratically over time against the fixed background of the stars. The Turkish word for planet is “gezegen”, similarly from the Turkish word “gezmek” (“to travel; to wander”). And again with Arabic (I don’t speak any Arabic languages, so I just looked it up on Wiktionary now) which has “كوكب سيار” (kawkab sayyār, “wandering star”). So that’s three different languages, which all named “planet” in the same way, based on the same observed characteristic of movement.
Contrast this, sticking with astronomy for now in honor of the JWST’s recent deployment, with the English word “galaxy”. This is from the Greek for the “Milky Way”, which is a pretty cool name but we’ve all heard it before. The Turks approached it differently; their word is “gökada”, which means “ sky island”. The Arab astronomers seem to have gone with المجرة (al-majarra, “the beam”).2 Three very different poetic descriptions for the same natural phenomenon.
As there are a zillion things in the world requiring their own nouns, I’m spoiled for choice in examples of well- or differently-named things in Turkish. Why not go with some insects?
A “hornet” is “eşek arısı” (“donkey bee”, probably because it kicks like one).
A “mosquito” is “sivrisinek” (“pointy fly”).
A “ladybug” is “uğur böceği” (“good luck bug”). I bet there must be some fun traditional ritual thing you do for luck when you see a ladybug in Turkey…
A “praying mantis” is “Peygamber devesi”. This one translates as “Prophet Camel”, which I thought was almost too awesome to be true. But then I read the Wikipedia entry for the mantis, which mentions that the Assyrians named it “necromancer (buru-enmeli) and soothsayer (buru-enmeli-ashaga)”, so I might as well stop this list here because I ain’t gonna do any better than that.
5. So many French loan-words
There are a surprising number of French loan-words in Turkish (Wikipedia suggests up to 5000). These came in during the Tanzimat reforms, when a lot of Ottoman students were sent to Europe to learn how to modernise the Empire.
I say “surprising” because these words have been transliterated into Turkish spelling, making them sometimes difficult to spot. Take for example the Turkish word for “makeup”, which is “makyaj” (this word fits with the general idea above of students bringing European culture back to the Empire). It wasn’t until I said this word out loud that I spotted its French origin; “maquillage”.
This illustrates a delightfully simple thing about Turkish, which is its predictable spelling. Since the modern Turkish alphabet was designed and implemented less than a century ago, the spelling is still nicely consistent, especially compared with the hodgepodge of Old Norse, Old English, and Latin-via-French that evolved into modern English spelling. Look again at that beautiful word “makyaj”; every letter is important, and it’s four letters shorter than the French version.
There is some entropy starting to creep in to Turkish spelling over time, with the gradual loss of the circumflexes from the vowels â, î and û, even though the slight differences in pronunciation that the circumflex signifies are retained. Other than these, its pretty easy to guess how a new word is spelled.
There is one particularly baffling compound noun that I didn’t include in the last section, but I wanted to leave it here in case anyone else tried to search for it. After all, the point of this blog is to write down some of the difficult words I’ve had to puzzle through on my own. This word is “torpido gözü”, or “torpedo eye”, which is the word for the glove box/glove compartment of a car. Obviously vastly different etymology to English.
I assume the French were responsible for introducing cars into Turkey, since many Turkish names for parts of a car are French loan-words (again with their spelling simplified into Turkish). “Clutch/brakes/headlights/gears” are the French-derived “debriyaj/fren/far/vites”, but “torpido gözü” is a mysterious exception; the French use the straightforward “boîte à gants”.
I was so certain that “torpedo” must be referring for some reason to the underwater weapon, that I didn’t check for a Wikipedia disambiguation page. I ended up going the long way through Ekşi Sözlük to get to the Wikipedia definition:
Torpedo – Continental term for an open four-seat car with soft hood and sporting tendencies and in which the line of the bonnet was continued back to the rear of the car.
So there we go. The “torpedo eye” name might have arrived via the French afterall, albeit hard to recognise now. There must be a lesson for me somewhere in the above about not being too sure about things…
6. The City versus the Country
In 2007, some Germans held a competition to identify the most beautiful word in the world. The winner was the Turkish word “yakamoz”; the reflection of light on water.
Unsurprisingly, “Yakamoz” is a popular name for hotels and restaurants in Turkey and abroad, and a popular addition to internet lists of “untranslatable” words.
Now we could start a conversation here about “untranslatable” versus “needs more than one word to translate”, or we could just learn something about Turkish literature instead (I choose the latter).
Personally, I’m a big fan of “kelebek” (“butterfly”), and “şelale” (“waterfall”) when it comes to Turkish words that sound beautiful. That first one is Turkic from way back, but the second one is from Arabic; these correspond roughly to two streams of language and literature that have run somewhat parallel in Turkish for a thousand years. Even now, they sometimes represent a cultural divide that can be seen in the TV shows discussed at this blog.
The pre-Islamic Turks were nomadic, practicing their shamanistic religions as they migrated with their herds. It wasnt until they started conquering their way through the faltering Byzantines in Anatolia that a more settled lifestyle was required, leading to the establishment of the Ottoman empire in 1300 CE. The nomads of course didn’t write a lot down and so much has been lost, but occasional writings survive such as those mentioned here. Instead, the nomads had an oral history, with all the fantastic folk tales you can imagine; the wandering minstrel poets (“ozan” and “aşık”) spreading epic tales or spiritual poems, often through song.
By contrast, the Ottoman royalty learned to write in Arabic script, and interacted with educated Persian and Arabic speakers from neighbouring countries. They adopted many of the long-established traditions of Islamic literature. Of course this meant that a lot of Persian and Arabic words crept in to the language; Arabic script doesn’t work particularly well with Turkish vowels, and Persian poetic metres don’t particularly match spoken Turkish. Not only did the Ottoman language diverge from that of the country folk, but the subject matter of the literature did too; the educated folks went for stuff like the highly ritualised and symbolic “dîvân” poetry collections, avoiding fiction altogether in favour of religious or philosophical debates.
Since the end of the Ottomans and the founding of the modern republic, both of these poetic traditions have come to be celebrated. However, a thousand-year cultural divide is not something that is overcome in an instant. You can see a little of it in this scene from Kara Sevda, S01E19 (2015). Here, the hero Kemal (born in the country) chooses to perform the traditional “Zeybek”3 dance at the wedding of his sister (to a rich city boy). No subtitles I’m afraid, but Turkish actors are very good at conveying emotions just with their eyes.
I have a couple more really nice examples of folk tradition vs Ottoman tradition that I want to talk about in the future, but the best of them are probably to do with music. From the Ottoman belly dancers to the “aşık” folk singers, its all still alive in Turkish culture today.
“Bal kabağı” if you’re curious; what we call “butternut pumpkin” here.
I think this is in the sense of wooden beam, not beam of light, but there’s no etymology on Wiktionary apart from a brief mention here, so any Arabic speakers please correct me.
Note that Kemal asks the musicians to play a “Harmandalı”, being a slower form of Zeybek originating in the Aegean region.