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Facebook Turkish II
Posted 12.08.11 at 06:35 PM UTC
Tagged turkish | # | Comment [0]
I'm proud of this one:
"Google da artık kadınlar gibi olmuş, cümlenin bitmesini beklemiyor :)"
Talking about Google Instant, I assume: "Now even Google has become like a woman, it doesn't wait for the end of your sentence."
Daily Challenge
Posted 11.30.11 at 02:25 PM UTC
Tagged turkish | # | Comment [0]
I often try to translate my Turkish friends' Facebook status updates on the fly. Especially since it's online and pretty colloquial/informal, this is particularly hard to do. Sometimes it's a pretty neat little tidbit.
I assume this is from a song or something:
"Olur, olur, bal gibi olur, oldu da!"
Given the repetition this one was fairly easy except for one tricky vocabulary word:
"It is, it is, like honey it is, and it also was!"
Weird.
T.G.I.F.
Posted 01.20.11 at 08:13 PM UTC
Tagged turkish | # | Comment [0]
We just had the biggest laughs in Turkish lesson history as we explained the meaning of "Thank God It's Friday." Our teacher, not religious, pointed out that this phrase might have even more meaning to a Muslim, since Friday is the day of prayer.
It might be better read, "Thank God, It's Friday."
We have a TGI Friday's in the 'burbs somewhat near us, and we were trying to explain the reason for the name. It will never be the same again.
Turkish Difficulty
Posted 01.08.11 at 10:40 AM UTC
Tagged turkish | # | Comment [1]
Just saw this on a banner ad and thought it was illustrative of how hard it is to go outside your native and nearby language families:
YİYEBİLDİĞİNİZ KADAR
You say this yee-yebeel-dee-eeneez kadar." And make a little whistle on that R if you can do it like Kristin can.
Yİ is irregular to start with, but it's the semi-conjugated stub of the verb "yemek," which means "to eat." Yemek also means cooked food, by the way. Uncooked food or food products are termed "yiyecek," which in this case translates to "that which will be eaten" but can also mean "he/she/it will eat." This can work as a participle, but in this case it looks like the proper term is "relative clause."
The next Y lets you add on the EBİL which by logical causation, grace, or luck actually means "able."
The DİĞ would be DİK if nothing came after it, but since there is another suffix, the K converts to a "soft G," since a K would stop the word mid-suffix-chain train wreck. In basic usage it makes a verb be fourth person past tense, but it gets you into a non-future participial/relative-clause mood when used mid-verb like this, especially when strung together with an EBİL or something exotic.
So, at this point you have "eat able that which."
Here's a fun twist versus English: clauses like this are actually possessed in Turkish. So, İNİZ is actually the respectful second-person possessive suffix. Which puts us with "eat able that which yours sir."
KADAR is an Arabic word (Arabic often screws up the grammar, provides a lot of the language's irregularities, and in this word's case takes on a lot of weird and disjointed purposes). It means "extent" most of the time. If you say "this big," kadar is in there, but it can also mean "up to." Thanks, Arabic.
So, even a clever grammarian at this point, without applying any additional context to the situation, would translate to "eat able that which yours sir to an extent."
To rephrase a little more in English without losing the fun, you have "to the extent of your ability to eat."
Or, as we might say, "All you can eat."
Oh, And
Posted 04.21.10 at 08:51 PM UTC
Tagged turkish | # | Comment [0]
If you're ever in the position to internationalize a web app, please do not auto-select language based on location. Or, if you do, make it darn easy to reverse the choice.
Despite being a fully authenticated heavy user of nearly everything Google, Blogger is unwilling to accept that I am not a fluent Turkish speaker. Which unfortunately leads me to çabuk çabuk çıkış yapmak, if you know what I'm saying.
But then again, you probably don't, and I barely do. So stop serving me Turkish pages, Blogger!
Wordsback
Posted 04.20.10 at 05:45 AM UTC
Tagged turkish | # | Comment [0]
Just found the perfect example of how backwards Turkish is:
SCMS'den aldığımız rapora istinaden.
Means:
Referring (istinaden) to (-a) the report (rapor) we (-ımız) took (aldığ) from (-den) SCMS.
Is That Meat-Related?
Posted 03.06.10 at 09:16 PM UTC
Tagged turkish | # | Comment [0]
The homophones department called, and it's time for a different website name.
Hodja
Posted 03.04.10 at 07:07 AM UTC
Tagged turkish | # | Comment [0]
I did some reading, and the Hodja is a famous story character in Turkish and general Islamic culture.
Once I thought about it, I realized (and later confirmed) that hodja is a transliteration of the Turkish hoca, which means a wise man or religious teacher.
This actually came up in a really cool book Kristin and I both read called The Yogurt Man Cometh, which is an American teacher's account of a time spent teaching in Turkey. The students called him hocam (my hoca), although they weren't supposed to do that because the word is very formal and archaic.
There is a lot of hold-over ultra-respect in Turkish daily usage. My blog platform is called efendi, which is like a lord or nobleman. If you can't understand a taxi driver, it's perfectly normal to say "my lord?" Of course, the general Turkish norm is to be pretty rough with the guy otherwise, but you still call him a nobleman when you can't hear him.
It's a lot like the Spanish señor, I think.
New Favorite
Posted 01.14.10 at 06:34 AM UTC
Tagged turkish | # | Comment [0]
My favorite word in the Turkish language is now "arkasında," which means "behind." This gets me to work in a taxi perfectly uneventfully.
Had I learned this word earlier, I would have had much less drama in my first year's rainy day commutes.
On the European side in Istanbul, the streets are a little crooked, and often one-way. Saying something is behind something else is sometimes the best you can do, especially when the target is small and at the bottom of a hill.