This last week we’re going over small different grammatical features, most recently phrases with the construction "X… X (da), for example: ya… ya (da)…. which means either… or… They are a little odd since if there is a verb used, it is placed in between the two clauses, which isn’t abnormal in English, but isn’t always the most intuitive.

Last week however, was my favorite Turkish verb tense: miş past tense aka story past.  This is completely unique to Turkish (and I’m going to guess a ton of different languages).  Information that is told second hand is given in miş-past, rather than the standard past (di- past).  This can be used to impart so much more meaning than I’m used to and a variety of different subtexts.  One of the songs we listened to, Dedikodu (Levant Yüksel) is about people gossiping about the singer, but instead of saying a kind of cumbersome phrase like “I heard that it is said that I …” the singer can just miş tense in the first person, which in two syllables accomplishes quite a bit of heavy lifting grammatically and semantically.  From Merve’s description of its usage, it’s situational and used in a lot of different contexts, and I suspect that it will be difficult for me to get acclimated to using it in the future, but for now it’s easy to use.  I am very curious how it developed since I don’t know of any other languages with a narrative/story past tense.

Song of the Week:

Dedikodu - Levent Yüksel

We didn’t get a chance to meet today (4/12), but we have been working on the future tense, which hopefully will make life much easier (inşallah hayat daha kolay olacak).  Like other tenses, there don’t appear to be any particularly tricky things here.  It follows patterns pretty closely.  The only thing that trips me up is that is a sound change (-acak [fut.] + -im [1st person sing. particle] = acağım), which doesn’t follow particularly intuitively now, but it follows other patterns.  Just a matter of practice and recognition I think.

I accidentally ran into Merve in New Orleans during spring break.  It’s not super relevant to anything, but I feel like writing it anyways.  We didn’t get a chance to talk much in Turkish unfortunately.  The last two weeks have been really slow.  I am continuing to work on adjectives/their formation with Merve, but there is a ton of work in other classes that’s making it difficult for me to sit down and adequately work through grammar.  I am working on some conjunctions (e.g. bu neden = therefore; çünü = because/since)

I’ve been a little bit ill lately, but we finally got a chance to have a lesson...  Imperatives.  These are fairly straightforward (an infinitive reduced to a very basic form).   In the plural, they form with an additional -in particle.  I also have been working on learning a hortative/jussive verb ending: -elsim/sin (i.e. et’s… / let…).  This is a little trickier.  Luckily, all of the grammar recently has a pretty direct comparison with Latin, which is convenient.

Last week I worked on the particle -ki.  It’s a multi use particle with genitive functions (like an ezafe particle in Persian), and is also used in a way that I can’t fully describe, but is almost like a relative pronoun  For example masada su means “the water is on the table,” but masadaki su means “the water on the table.”  This week is word endings (-lı, -kap,-lık, -cı), usually as a way to derive another noun or an adjective from a noun.  Additionally, I am working on comparatives/superlatives… daha (more) and en (most).  They work almost identically to English.  There’s a surprisingly large amount of overlap in this grammar between it all, which is making it easier for me.

The current goal is telling time.  Numbers are very easy… It’s a straightforward decimal number system that simply adds number together… no need to memorize a separate word for “twelve” or “eleven” it’s just ten two and ten one, and it doesn’t obey weird pluralization rules like Arabic (don’t get me started).  The big issue that I’m having is with the case endings.  ###’de is for “at ### o’clock.”  ###den ###2e kadar is for “from ### to ###2.”  They’re not that difficult when writing it all out, but when added to the vowel harmony rules already in place, it can be really hard to remember which is which while speaking.  I think this is more of a practice thing for me, and it’s just a matter of spending more time with times.  One of the tricks I used for learning Arabic numbers was to constantly number things my head, and I’m trying to do the same with Turkish and constantly tell time to myself in Turkish and explain my calendar.

After last semester's cultural presentation, I was half-convinced to write a series of posts on the wild times of the early Turkish Republic’s hyper nationalism.  One of my favorite areas are the Turkish Historical Thesis and Sun Language theory.  Essentially, the Turkish Historical Thesis (TRT) stated that the Turks were the original inhabitants of Anatolia, and that the Hittites and Sumerians were proto-Turks.  They eventually left Anatolia for Central Asia, and from there spread out again to bring civilization to Europe and China  The Sun language theory is related to TRT and is essentially an attempt at creating goropisms (absurd etymologies) proving that modern words all descend from Turkic ones.  Both of these theories are patently absurd and are rejected by all except a few fringe writers (websites following).  While it’s easy to laugh at these theories, when looking at their contemporaries in American eugenics and Nazi racial science, they’re actually quite remarkable as an attempt by Turkey to combat European prejudices against Turkish academia and to create a place for Turkey in the world of intellectual history.  As serious intellectual ideas, they don’t hold up, but as a piece of history, they fit into a broader story of Turkey emerging from the Ottoman Empire and trying to be embraced by the European community.

Sumerianturks.org

sunlanguagetheory.org

Aside from a prolific poetry career, Rumi founded the Mevlevi order (also of Arabic-Ottoman Turkish origin), which is better known in English as the Whirling Dervishes.  To explain them better, I should explain a little bit about Sufism.  Sufis are fairly diverse in their practice, but one of the most uniting things is Zikir (dhikr in Arabic), which is a ritual focusing on reciting the names of God, short prayers, or verses from the Quran.  This can be accompanied by by a variety of different rituals, including singing, music, meditation, inducing trances, incense, etc.  For the Mevlevis, this is dancing, the Whirling in Whirling Dervishes.  It’s called Sama (you thought you were going to learn Turkish… surprise! it’s all Arabic today… for this word, lengthen the final vowel and add a voiced pharyngeal fricative to the end).  The origins are somewhat mythic, but my favorite story is that Rumi was walking through the markets in Konya and heard the goldsmiths chanting the shahada [i.e. “there is no god but God,” but in Arabic] and the rhythm of the hammers combined with the shahada (which is oftentimes recited during zikir) caused him to spontaneously start twirling and dancing.  This sparked the most notable practice.  I’m not incredibly familiar with the teachings, but the current order claims to be somewhat unorthodox in Islam.  The order was banned by Atatürk during the secularization of the early Turkish Republic, but it still persists to some extent and is actually a small tourist attraction in some parts of Turkey.

Mevlevi’s performing Sama

Aside from a prolific poetry career, Rumi founded the Mevlevi order (also of Arabic-Ottoman Turkish origin), which is better known in English as the Whirling Dervishes.  To explain them better, I should explain a little bit about Sufism.  Sufis are fairly diverse in their practice, but one of the most uniting things is Zikir (dhikr in Arabic), which is a ritual focusing on reciting the names of God, short prayers, or verses from the Quran.  This can be accompanied by by a variety of different rituals, including singing, music, meditation, inducing trances, incense, etc.  For the Mevlevis, this is dancing, the Whirling in Whirling Dervishes.  It’s called Sama (you thought you were going to learn Turkish… surprise! it’s all Arabic today… for this word, lengthen the final vowel and add a voiced pharyngeal fricative to the end).  The origins are somewhat mythic, but my favorite story is that Rumi was walking through the markets in Konya and heard the goldsmiths chanting the shahada [i.e. “there is no god but God,” but in Arabic] and the rhythm of the hammers combined with the shahada (which is oftentimes recited during zikir) caused him to spontaneously start twirling and dancing.  This sparked the most notable practice.  I’m not incredibly familiar with the teachings, but the current order claims to be somewhat unorthodox in Islam.  The order was banned by Atatürk during the secularization of the early Turkish Republic, but it still persists to some extent and is actually a small tourist attraction in some parts of Turkey.

Mevlevi’s performing Sama

Orhan Pamuk is one of the most prominent Turkish authors, and my personal favorite (in particular the White Castle, Beyaz Kale).  He is most notable for winning the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2006 amidst a trial for insulting Turkishness.  In 2005, Pamuk talked about the Armenian Genocide and Kurdish mass killings, and he was then sued by ultra-nationalists for insulting Turkishness and the Turkish army.  The charges were dropped in January 2006, but were appealed and he was ordered to pay 6000 liras in 2011 for his “crimes.”  Since the early 2000s, he has been a literatuer professor at Columbia.  He is one of the most prominent writers and intellectuals on the “East-West” divide which informs and influences many of his novels.

MFÖ, similar to Barış Manço, emerged in the 1970s as part of the growing music interaction between Turkey and the West.  It is named after Mazhar Alanson, Fuat Güner, and Özkan Uğur (M, F, and Ö respectively).  They are more in the pop tradition than the Anadolu Rock of Barış Manço, but they wrote songs and performed in a wide variety of genres.  Twice MFÖ represented Turkey in Eurovision (now boycotted by Turkey over perceived unfair voting as well as LGBTQ representation), in 1985 with Didadi Didadi Dai and 1988 with Sufi.  The two songs represent some of the diversity of their music.  Didai Didai Dai, which is a nonsense title, is a love song (sometimes the title is given as Aşık Oldum… I fell in love), but Sufi is a song with a strong mystical element about Sufism.  The band is still active today.

Ne Bileyim Ben

Barış Manço is one of my favorite Turkish musicians.  Born in the 1940s, he started his music career in the late 50s and early 60s, before emerging in 1970 as one of the most successful Turkish artists of all time.  Manço’s contemporaries include Queen, ABBA, and Led Zeppelin, and while his music is not directly influenced by them, he shares a common root in various pop and rock bands that dominated the music scene at the time.  However, he, along with other artists of the time, combined the European and American influences with traditional Turkish music styles to create the beginnings of Anadolu Rock, Anatolian Rock.  Manço continued in popularity eventually culminating in the show 7’den 77’ye (from 7 to 77), which is similar to the Tonight Show in the United States, a talk show with musical, travel, and children's parts.  He travelled to nearly 150 different countries and as a result gained significant popularity outside Turkey, including in Japan where he released a live album in 1996.  Eventually, Manço died in early 1999, which came as a massive shock to Turkey.  He was buried in Istanbul.  To this day, tribute bands and albums as well as his own music continue to be popular throughout Turkey and abroad.

Barış Manço is one of my favorite Turkish musicians.  Born in the 1940s, he started his music career in the late 50s and early 60s, before emerging in 1970 as one of the most successful Turkish artists of all time.  Manço’s contemporaries include Queen, ABBA, and Led Zeppelin, and while his music is not directly influenced by them, he shares a common root in various pop and rock bands that dominated the music scene at the time.  However, he, along with other artists of the time, combined the European and American influences with traditional Turkish music styles to create the beginnings of Anadolu Rock, Anatolian Rock.  Manço continued in popularity eventually culminating in the show 7’den 77’ye (from 7 to 77), which is similar to the Tonight Show in the United States, a talk show with musical, travel, and children's parts.  He travelled to nearly 150 different countries and as a result gained significant popularity outside Turkey, including in Japan where he released a live album in 1996.  Eventually, Manço died in early 1999, which came as a massive shock to Turkey.  He was buried in Istanbul.  To this day, tribute bands and albums as well as his own music continue to be popular throughout Turkey and abroad.

Turkish Syntax

This semester I have been taking an introduction to syntax class and one of the topics we covered is head position in phrase structures (as a side note: I almost certainly am using some of the terminology wrong here).  English is a (generally) head-initial language.  Essentially, in English, phrases tend to follow a structure with a head followed by its complement.  Prepositional phrases are just that, prepositional, with the head (a preposition) before the rest of the phrase.  Similarly, in verb phrases verbs precede their complements (i.e. grammatical objects).  This compares with Turkish which is head-final (at least in the cases that I know of).  Turkish lacks prepositions, but certain noun cases and suffixes act similarly to prepositions and provide the same information that would be given in English through prepositions, thus making the suffixes postpositions since they follow the noun phrase.  Similarly, the order of verbs and objects are flipped with Turkish having a SOV word order (compared with English’s SVO word order).  Since my knowledge of syntax is not particularly deep, nor is my knowledge of Turkish, I wish I could explore this further, but I think Turkish’s head-final nature and knowing how this compares with English and others languages I’ve studied will be an important piece of information to have in the future and will be helpful for categorizing and explaining bits of Turkish grammar.

Turkish Syntax

This semester I have been taking an introduction to syntax class and one of the topics we covered is head position in phrase structures (as a side note: I almost certainly am using some of the terminology wrong here).  English is a (generally) head-initial language.  Essentially, in English, phrases tend to follow a structure with a head followed by its complement.  Prepositional phrases are just that, prepositional, with the head (a preposition) before the rest of the phrase.  Similarly, in verb phrases verbs precede their complements (i.e. grammatical objects).  This compares with Turkish which is head-final (at least in the cases that I know of).  Turkish lacks prepositions, but certain noun cases and suffixes act similarly to prepositions and provide the same information that would be given in English through prepositions, thus making the suffixes postpositions since they follow the noun phrase.  Similarly, the order of verbs and objects are flipped with Turkish having a SOV word order (compared with English’s SVO word order).  Since my knowledge of syntax is not particularly deep, nor is my knowledge of Turkish, I wish I could explore this further, but I think Turkish’s head-final nature and knowing how this compares with English and others languages I’ve studied will be an important piece of information to have in the future and will be helpful for categorizing and explaining bits of Turkish grammar.

Turks outside of Turkey

Due to a long history of migration and resettlement, there are more than a few non-Turkish Turks, i.e. ethnic Turks, speaking Turkish and with Turkish cultural practices, but no formal legal connection to the Turkish Republic, living outside of Turkey.  These communities exist all over the middle east and eastern Europe in the former territory of the Ottoman Empire, but many of them have shrunk as a result of migration to Turkey or to other countries.  In much of eastern Europe, in particular Bulgaria, Greece, Macedonia, and Kosovo, large Turkish communities exist and have some legal rights to study and use their own language, but local discrimination and long standing ethnic tensions do exist, especially in Greece which does not recognize the existence of a large part of its Turkish community.  In the Levant, Iraq has a large Turkish minority, approximately 3 million people (out of 35 million total Iraqis), who are called Iraqi Turkmen (note: Turkmen in this case is the term used to describe Turks living in Arab countries; Turkmen is also the name of an ethnic group living in Turkmenistan.  They’re all Turkic peoples).  Syria likewise has between several hundred thousand to three million Syrian Turkmen (the Syrian Civil War has made accurate counting difficult and there is limited data beforehand)  Both of these populations were and are heavily oppressed by the respective Ba’athist regimes in their countries, including being banned from using or teaching Turkish, so many speak Arabic as a first or second language.  North Africa (excluding Morocco) has a large population of Turkish descent, but it’s difficult to ascertain accurate numbers so estimates range from several hundred thousand to up to a quarter of the population of each country depending on who is doing the estimates.  In all of these cases, identifying someone as Turkish is a political statement.  It builds a direct tie between the Turkish Republic and these communities which can be regarded with suspicion or repression by the other governments or communities in the region, and while the Turkish Republic is politically distinct from the Ottoman Empire, there’s an undertone of its former control and legacy that’s present.  Wars and political conflicts make it difficult to get accurate figures on the Turkish population outside of Turkey as well as information on their cultural identity and practices.

Secularism in Turkey

In 1923 with the establishment of the Turkish Republic and under the leadership of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, Turkey rapidly transitioned in both politics and identity.  One of the guiding sets of principles is the altı ok (six arrows), which refer to Republicanism (cumhuriyetçilik), Populism (halkçılık), Nationalism (milliyetçilik), Secularism (laiklik), Statism (devletçilik), and Reformism (devrimcilik).  To the best of my knowledge (which is admittedly not that great) these concepts are invoked in a manner similar to how “liberty” or “democracy” or “American values” are talked about in an American political context, while they do have specific, narrow definitions, they have an almost emotional appeal and their meaning changes significantly depending on who’s speaking and to whom.  The one that I want to talk about most here is secularism, laiklik (the Turkish word originating from French, laïque, cognate with lay or layman in English in contrast with clergy).  Early Turkish Republican secularism was highly reactive to Islam and a lot of reforms were made to separate Islam from public life and secondarily to Turkicize Islam, even going so far as to have Turkish used rather than Arabic in many religious contexts (e.g. the call to prayer).  This was not particularly well received and much of the Turkicization was reversed in 1950.  Secularism and the separation of Islam from public life has a much more complex legacy with a myriad of individual opinions on it.  In conversations I’ve had with people and some of the media I’ve seen online, feelings are mixed about secularism with some considering it an essential part of being Turkish and other considering it, well, the opposite and that Turkey should cease to be a secular country.  Erdoğan is currently desecularizing much of the country according to a lot of American analyses [to be clear, I do not know how he is perceived in Turkey].  In the future, it will be interesting to see how secularism continues to change and develop in its role in Turkish governance and public life.

Charles XII in the Ottoman Empire

I was initially writing about food in Turkey, but I got highly side tracked and realized that this would make a good cultural post as well.  In May the Swedish government stated that Swedish meatballs are in fact Turkish in origin.  It’s called köfte in Turkish and was brought back to Sweden by King Charles XII.  But why was Charles XII there in the first place?  During the early 1700s Sweden, under Charles XII, was involved in the Great Northern War against Russia, Poland-Lithuania, and Denmark-Norway.  The war is completely unrelated to Turkey, so to make a long story short, Charles XII lost a decisive battle at Poltova in 1709 and ended up fleeing into the Ottoman Empire with about 1000-1500 men.  He spent several years camped near a city called Bender in present day Moldova.  Eventually, he ran out his hospitality and an Ottoman army came to arrest him.  The name of this incident in Swedish is Kalabaliken i Bender, meaning the Kalabalik of Bender.  The word Kalabalik means a confusion, disorder, or disturbance in Swedish and Finnish, but it comes from a native Turkish word kalabalık, which means just a crowd.