Türkce dili

today again at the factory.

awoke to find two more people have joined us at mehmet's. one speaks some english, one does not. from downstairs now i hear Turkish and a boiling kettle and i smell dumplings.

i do not have a problem communicating with the puppy, who has enormous paws, nor with the cat. but otherwise i have trying to convey, mostly, please and thank-you.

it helps that turkish uses the alphabet i know, though the letter sounds are all different here, a different timbre of sound. vowels are cleaner than they are in north american english. down with dipthongs! every vowel makes exactly one sound. U seems to be a french-sounding U. A is always a short A. E is a long A. I is long. meanwhile consonants are more clipped. T is always T, never D; F never slips to V. C makes Tse. an accent over an S or a C works like an H -- from S to Sh, from C to Ch. an accent over a G sound drops it in the mouth til it no longer is recognizably a G. so, mehmet's girlfriend's name, phonetically oor, is in fact spelled uğur -- that is, 'uyur,' but reduce the Y sound until it is nearly gone. H's have a little bit of breathiness in them but hardly any. the R sound is not like an english R, not like a french R, nor is it a rolled R. more like an R crossed with an H, just a touch of haspiration.

vowels can have umlauts over them -- not sure how they work yet. some consonants also can have little tails, works like an H -- from S to Sh and C to Ch.

grammar-wise, turkish has a structure like apostrophe-S in english (the genitive case -- gets me hot baby to hear you say those words again after all this time). but this is not just to indicate possession. so, when pointing to canada on a map you'd say "kanada", but to say "i am of canada", you would have to change it from "kanada" to "kanadadan." you'd say, kanadadan geliyorum.

to say hello to someone is Selamin Aleyküm, and when someone says that to you, you say back Aleyküm Selamin, same thing only backwards.

i spent part of today talking with mehmet's uncle, over coffee (kava) and lunch (öğle yemegi), as mehmet saw to business. the uncle speaks french -- so today i spoke almost as much french as english, and, amazingly, my list of turkish words to learn is not an english-turkish list but a french-turkish list. today's words are:

- good morning : günaydin
- good day : iyi günler
- good evening : iyi akşamlar
- good night : iyi geceler
- yes, no, maybe : evet, hayir, belki
- where, when : nerete, nezaman
- my name is : ismim NOTE now i can say a rough approximation of "call me ishmael," it'd be "ismim ishmael"
- me, you, he/she : ben, sen, o. plurals biz, siz, onlar
- please, thank-you : lütfen, mersi (same as french)
- to right, to left : sağ, sol
- hot, cold, neutral : sicak, soğuk, ilik

coffee is kava. tea is čay (think "chai") -- those two are easy. sugar is šigir -- that one's easy too -- cream is krema. and to count to ten from zero is : sifir, bir, iki, üč, dört, bez, alti, yedi, sekiz, dokuz, on.

mehmet tells me i need to work on my vowel sounds -- though, frankly, he says it "wowel."

interesting to be so much out of my element. english is so damn easy and furthermore there is always something to say -- at this very moment outside my room they are doing something with the plumbing, hammering into the concrete, i merely quote bob dylan -- last night across the alley there was a poundin' on the wall: musta been your don pasquale makin' a 2:00 A.M booty call. dig? i have talked in the past about clear and honest communication. it is different here, kinda. what if mehmet and his uncle were gone and no one spoke my language? things would matter more then.

today's pictures are of the classroom above the Laleli store. note how the chairs are all arranged in perfect rows and columns even when the room is empty. at the back, under the windows, are greyblue pots of herbs.



back at mo's house we have taken the chimney apart and are installing a heat exchanger, to squeeze the last drips of juice out of the stove. night before last it was so hot it was making me dizzy and mo was sweating in just an undershirt. we have been experimenting trying to find a way to use processed olive pits for fuel. we burned through a whole box of them. the stove got so hot so fast it started to shudder. the cat fled. it was great.