What’s the end goal of language learning? It has to be fluency, right? We are told though, that fluency is an unattainable goal once you reach a certain age; language learning is just too hard for anyone other than children, and adults learning a second language will never be fluent.
Freddie DeBoer rubbished these ideas in an excellent motivational post last week, and I’ll quote some of it later. But first I want to mention a concept that I was going to include in my nationalist symbolism post, except it never quite fit there. It’s an old Turkish word for having goals and fixating hard on them; a word for the concept of desiring something and striving for it, even though you accept that you may never achieve it; a word for the beauty of the unachievable goal itself. It’s something that is mentioned quite regularly in Turkish historical dramas: the goal of “Kızılelma”, or the “Red Apple”.
This concept is so ancient and draped in layers of meaning that it’s difficult to define precisely. Probably because of this, it’s often used as a code word in historical dramas, when spies need to identify themselves to each other. See for example this exchange between two cloaked figures on Diriliş: Ertuğrul, meeting on a dark and foggy night (Youtube link, or click the following for audio):1
Dur Yolcu! Yol nereyedir?
(Stop, Traveller! Where does your road take you?)Kızılelma’yadır!
(To the Red Apple!)Menzil neredir?
(Where will you stop to rest?)Şehadettir.
(In martyrdom.)Vuslat kimedir?
(Does your beloved await you?)Vatanadır.
(My beloved homeland waits.)Vatan neredir?
(Where is the homeland?)Tüm cihandır.
(It’s all the world.)
Identities established, the two begin their plotting to conquer the world. This exchange does capture a surprising amount of the meaning around “Kızılelma”, as I understand it; in short it stands for a legendary or even mythical goal, one usually involving conquest, something you strive for even though you may never reach it. More specifically in the above clip, it refers to the goal of uniting the Turks in their own homeland, an endpoint (the foundation of the Ottoman Empire) that neither of the two speakers lives to see.
The mythical, unreachable status of the Red Apple was laid upon it through hundreds of years of Classical Turkish poetry, which in the borrowed styles of the Arabic and Persian poets is full of yearning and melancholy and layers of poetic meaning. Those archaic words in the clip above: “menzil” (the rest stops dotted along a caravan route) and “vuslat” (a meeting or reuniting, especially with one’s beloved) would no doubt bring this old literature to mind for a Turkish speaker.
That last word “vuslat” is particularly meaningful; the comparison between the imagined beauty of the Red Apple and the beauty of your beloved (or your beloved Allah) was a common theme for Ottoman poets. Check out this detailed body-imagery from 16th century poet Lütfî-i Kâdî:2
Dīvār çekdi ġabġabına ḫaṭṭ-ı kāfiri
Ruḫsār-ı yār ṣan Ḳızılelma ḥiṣārıdur(The fine hairs under your double chin3 are infidel soldiers building a wall
My lover’s cheek is like a fortified Red Apple)
Here are some more examples to illustrate “Kızılelma”, taken from the Saltuknâme; the compilation of Turkish oral histories, folk literature and proverbs that was collected and recorded in the year 1480 by order of the Sultan. The main hero of the Saltuknâme is the legendary warrior Sarı Saltuk, but others also feature, such as Murad Han.4 Here, Murad receives a poetic set of divine battle-orders, instructing him to go out and start conquering:5
En son Murad Han Gazi, İznik’de Resul hazretini rüyasında gördü:
-Kalkın, Edirne şehrine gidin, ocağınızdır, gazilerin yeridir, Orası; Darü’n-nasr, beytü’l-feth ve arz-ı şerifdir. Oradan her nereye zafer fetih niyetiyle giderseniz hazır olur. Kuvvetlenirsiniz; batıyı, doğuyu, kuzeyi ve güneyi; bu dört köşe ova ve denizi oradan fethedersiniz. Adalet ile galip olup o yerleri alacaksınız. Oradan yürüyüp Kızılelma’yı da sizin nesliniz fethedecek. Âlem size boyun eğecek, dedi.(Lastly, Murad Han Gazi dreamed of the Messenger of Allah in Iznik. He said:
-Get up, go to the city of Edirne, it is your hearth, the place of veterans; the city of the helpers, of conquest, of blessed soil. Wherever you go from there with the intention of victory and conquest, it will be waiting. You become stronger; west, east, north and south; you will conquer this square plain and the sea from there. You will prevail with justice and take those places. Your generation will walk from there and conquer the Red Apple. The world will bow to you.”)
That quote is a serious motivational speech suitable for inspiring the troops, but the next story is light-hearted. The joke is that Sarı Saltuk finds an actual real place in his travels called “The Red Apple”, when the audience knows it’s supposed to be abstract and intangible:
Büyük bir şehre rastladılar. Burada büyük bir kilise vardı. Kapısı kapatılmış. Altun bir top kubbesinde dururdu. Kızıl altından idi ve bir elmaya benziyordu. Şerif Saltık: Bu nedir, diye sordu. Onlar: Buna, Kızılelma derler, dediler.
(They came across a big city. There was a big church there. It’s door was sealed shut. On top of the cupola there was a golden ball. It was red gold and looked like an apple. Saltuk asked: What is this? They said: They call it “Kızılelma”.)
The concept of apples as a legendary prize is not limited to Turkish myth. The Abrahamic religions share the story of the forbidden fruit in the Garden of Eden, and Greek mythology is full of Golden Apples, including the one that kicked off the Trojan War. Wikipedia has a whole list of such things; I’ve only just now learned of the “balls of red gold” from Irish mythology, which I mention mainly because the Gaelic font in this 1857 version of the Fághail Chraoibhe Cormaic mac Airt looks amazing (see picture).
In these stories it’s only the heroes like Murad Han, or Paris, or Cormac who win their Red Apples; the rest of us mortals merely get to strive towards them, and write poems about their imagined beauty. For adults learning a new language, will the Red Apple of fluency hang forever out of reach?
Returning now to Freddie DeBoer’s post on learning Korean. It’s a good read; his satisfaction with making progress in something worthwhile yet difficult is a vicarious joy.
It’s Freddie’s thoughts on “the obsession with fluency” that ring true for me:
[…] while I intend to keep getting better, I’m sure I’ll never achieve fluency by anyone’s metrics. I just don’t particularly care; fluency is a moving target that’s typically in the eye of the beholder, and anyway my goal is not to speak Korean like a native speaker. My goal is to be able to engage in effective communication in the Korean language, to make myself understood and be able to navigate in Korean language spaces, and to have the skills and confidence necessary to fill in the gaps when I encounter them. I’m on my way to doing that, and as slow going as it’s been, it feels great. So who cares about fluency? It’s a construct that simply isn’t important to me. My advice is that, if you’re interested in learning another language, decide that it’s something you really want to commit to. Then don’t get hung up on the eventual ceiling for your abilities and just dive in.
If the fact that fluency seems unachievable might cause you to give up, or even worse, never start in the first place, then it’s not a helpful goal to have. What do you really want to achieve?
In contrast to Freddie whose partner is a native Korean speaker, my only Turkish speaking practice is talking to my language apps, or mumbling to myself while mowing the lawn. Becoming “fluent” is not going to happen unless I start paying for conversation lessons.
But that’s not why I got into this hobby in the first place. For me, learning Turkish started as a way to increase my enjoyment of a TV show I was watching, one where I lacked understanding of both language and culture. Then, I became fascinated by the weirdly incongruous phrases that would often appear in machine-translated subtitles, and I wanted to understand the robot’s (lack of) thought process leading it to propose such bizarre translations. Here’s an example from the last thing I watched (this week’s episode6 of Kuruluş: Osman), showing how history and etymology are more important for my needs than conversational fluency:
For me, the Red Apple would be to effortlessly understand a native Turkish speaker on-screen without subtitles.7 Just to make it super unattainable, let’s add in all the knowledge of Ottoman Turkish, Arabic, and Persian language and history, plus modern Turkish pop culture, that is necessary to understand every joke, historical reference and slip of the tongue. A daunting goal, right? Easier to just give up now?
Occasionally, a little success will remind me that I am indeed picking up some Turkish culture in addition to language, and that the Red Apple is just a little closer. Here’s another example from the last week; one that made me particularly proud of myself.
I wanted to watch the first episode of KanalD’s Veda Mektubu (“Farewell letter”),8 and since there were no subtitles available I had OpenAI’s Whisper9 hallucinate some for me. I ran these through Google Translate to get some serviceable English subtitles. This worked pretty well with one hilariously notable exception (see picture).
What the…? The subtitle “This hill is not a sandy hill nor half a semen” popped up out of nowhere into a dialog-free scene. Even before the next line appeared (“I used to say that the water comes, the spring hangs”), I am pleased to report that I knew exactly what was going on here!
It’s a bad translation of a song that I actually really like: a traditional Turkish folk song called Bu Tepe Pullu Tepe (“This Hill, This Snowy Hill”).10 The melody had crept in to the background of the scene, and I probably subconsciously recognised it. Then Whisper, which seems very uncomfortable with quiet scenes, had begun printing the lyrics on screen a full 10 seconds before the singer opened his mouth.
I hadn’t heard this exact version of Bu Tepe Pullu Tepe (by Oğuz Aksaç) before. My favourite version features the amazing vocal harmonies of Samida:
Although for those who prefer instruments to vocals, I also really like this mournful version by Hüseyin Korkankorkmaz, who is a master of the traditional bağlama:
What did I pick up on, to correctly interpret the awful subtitle from Whisper and Google here? The first two words “this hill…” likely helped me notice the melody playing in the background, but the word “half” was the clincher.
Now, Turkish has a few really confusing homophones, and two that I used to have trouble remembering are “yarın” (“tomorrow”) and “yarım” (“a half”). The very first Turkish folk song that I liked (Kara Toprak, discussed here) introduced me to a third: the archaic “yârim” (“lover”).
This old word “yârim” had me confused in the past, especially since in modern Turkish people often leave off the “şapka” (“hat”) from the <â>, so now I remember it well. Google is yet to catch up; but Whisper actually gets it right, on the first attempt at least. It correctly hears the long <â> vowel in the first line, even through Oğuz Aksaç’s mumbling croon, transcribing as follows:
Whisper:
Bu tepe kumlu tepe ne de yârim meni.
Su gelir sere sarkar eski derdim hani.
A better transcription:11
Bu tepe pullu tepe nenni de yarim nenni
Su gelir serpe serpe eski de yarim hani
So “half” in the subtitle is due to Google not knowing how to translate the word “yârim”, and “semen” is due to Whisper mishearing “nenni” (“lullaby”) as “meni”, which Google then correctly translates.
So there we have it. I felt proud because I recognised an ancient word from an ancient song; a snippet of culture to help with my understanding of language. Another step on the journey to the Red Apple of fluency - though I’ll probably never reach it, it remains a beautiful goal.
(Don’t ask me to translate the full lyrics of Bu Tepe Pullu Tepe though; I’m just going to take the win and stop here. I struggle with the use of that little particle “de” (“so; also; too”) at the best of times, and I can’t really tell what it’s doing there. It could be simply adding emphasis, or even be an imperative of “demek” (“to say”).
In fact, the internet doesn’t seem to agree what the definitive lyrics are: compare this old site which quite authoritatively gives “Eski de yarin hanı”; i.e. alternating “yarim” with “yarin” between the two echoed lines, and spelling “hanı” with a dotless <ı>. Seems to me the words are drifting slightly with time and entropy, like old nursery rhymes in English.)
References:
Şentürk, Oğuz; “Hâkimiyetin Sembolü: Kızılelma” (“Symbol of Dominance: Golden Apple”); Türk Dünyası Araştırmaları; 123 (242) 131-140 (2019).
Şen, Yasin; “Klasik Türk Şiirinde Kızılelma” (“Kızılelma in Classical Turkish Poetry”); Journal of Turkish Language and Literature; 3 (4) 197-218 (2017).
Diriliş: Ertuğrul 71. Bölüm; timestamp 1:42:19
No, I can’t read that transliterated Ottoman Turkish. I made that English translation there after reading the discussion of the couplet in Turkish in Ref. 2 (page 209), and plugging the words one by one into an online Ottoman Turkish dictionary. Apologies for errors, which will be even more likely than usual.
The beauty of a good double chin seems to be a fetish for Ottoman poets; that word “ġabġab” is used a lot.
There are far too many Murads for me to keep track of, but I think this one refers to Murad the First, great-grandson of Ertuğrul.
Via Ref 2; my heavily modified Google Translation
Kuruluş Osman 121. Bölüm; timestamp 2:15:26
Right now, if the subtitles fail for some reason, I have to hit pause after every spoken line and replay it in my head in an often-unsuccessful attempt to extract meaning out of it, and that is exhausting.
A quick review of Veda Mektubu (“Farewell letter”) S01E01: a solid first episode with a couple of actors that I like. My wife is a bit dubious of the chemistry between the young couple; we will probably watch episode 2 to confirm.
It’s not a guide as such, but my earlier post on Whisper has some details on how I do this.
At least, I think it’s snowy; “pul” in modern Turkish seems to be the word for small, flat things like postage stamps or sequins or fish scales. Here, I think it refers to snowflakes.
From Oğuz Aksaç’s official Youtube version.
I'm sure there's an app or service in which people speaking different languages are cross-practicing each other but I cannot remember a name. If that doesn't exist though, it would be a nice product to make :)
When you're in doubt about something deeper than just face to face conversation might not be able to solve you can just make a post about it and somebody will clarify it for you in comment section.
And congratulations for your bold red apple, you're striving to be inside maybe 1% of the Turkish population even without counting the Arabic and Persian fluency. Some stuff fly over the heads of even the most culturally fluent people.