Language learning is a hobby for me. On top of my mother tongue German I fluently speak four languages, the most exotic of which being Russian, on top of which I speak fairly fluent Turkish and Spanish, as well as decent Persian. In the past I have also "flirted" with a range of other languages which I certainly don't claim speaking; I had five years of Latin in school, and at various later moments stuck my nose into introductory courses of Polish, Greek, Bambara, Yiddish, Swedish, Japanese, and Indonesian, not to mention the countless languages of which I tried to assimilate a few words when travelling through areas in which they were spoken.
If there was one language I have had the intention to earnestly undertake learning some day for several years now, it is Kurdish. If I managed to push it off for so long, it is probably because my Turkish is relatively good, and most Kurdish speakers today are at least bilingual, Turkish, besides European languages, being one of the languages they most commonly master the best.
Although the mother tongue of over 20 Million people, Kurmandji Kurdish can be said to be the most "obscure" language I ever engaged in learning. Why? Because it is not the national language of any nation state as of yet, and as such it has never yet been perfectly standardized. This also meanst that learning it proved more difficult than it had been with any other language so far.
Today there are all types of media in this language, but this is a relatively new thing of the past few decades. People still do not receive university diplomas in this language, nor do they undergo high school or primary school education in it. In the sixties intellectuals got long prison sentences in Turkey simply for translating to or from this language. In the 1980s the language was altogether forbidden in that country, and speakers were abused in the worst of fashions; there are anecdotes of mistreatments like soldiers smearing dog feces into the mouths of people they overheard speaking Kurdish on the street, alongside with more common beatings or other physical abuse. As late as 1991 several Turkish MPs received decade-long prison sentences for having pronounced their parliamentary oath in Kurdish.
Although by now a number of handbooks teaching the language exist, these are hard to come by except in specialized language stores. The courses that you will find when searching for material teaching this language reflect the harsh realities on the terrain: This video course, after teaching you to introduce yourself and to ask the way, has a lesson dedicated to answering the police's question when in a cell. In it, the police interrogator cynically asks: "Do you only speak Kurdish? Or do you also know some normal language, like English, French, German, Chinese?"
At the beginning I tried to learn Kurdish from friends, native speakers of the language. When asking how to translate this or that item of vocabulary, the answers I got often resembled these:
"Well, me personally, I just use the Turkish word for this. But I know there is a Kurdish word, too, just I cannot think of it now" or "I just use the Turkish word, but my mum would use [this or that word], my grand-mother [another one], in Diyarbakir they would use [this or that word], and in Hakkari they would use [yet another term]." A language difficult to even dream of trying to fully fathom, in short.
Things did not necessarily get much clearer once I started using books. I have at least five different manuals teaching Kurmanji Kurdish (counting digital ones, even more). Spelling sometimes varies for single words. Variations are slight, so most of the time this is not so much a problem as a curiosity.
One book dates back to the nineties when spelling regulations were not unified yet, and instead of the letters i and î, it systematically uses ı and i.
As any language learner knows, once you start understanding a little more of a language you have put some effort into learning, the experience of trying out one's newly acquired skills is always a thrilling and rewarding one.
I remember the first time I tried to speak Kurdish instead of Turkish when hitch-hiking in the region around Diyarbakir. The reactions I got were invariably even warmer than they usually would have been. Switching to Turkish, people very quickly opened up and told me stories speaking from their hearts in an even franker fashion than as of usual.
But even when just sitting at home at my desk, some good fun was to be had. Suddenly, I started to understand the lyrics of the songs that I was listening to for years! "Min Bêriye Te Kiriye" for example is a classic by Kurdish superstar Şiwan Perwer, which most young Westerners with an interest in music from Turkey will have first listened to in the version of Aynur Doğan.
Part of its lyrics go:
Ez çend sale ez girtîme
Zulm û zorî gellek dîme
Lê bê welat te di jîme
Baverke birîya te kîrye
Ji nabên te na be jîne
Ji nabên te ez di jîme
Jîna bê te qiymet nîne
Bipirse ji dîvarên hepsê
Evê ji tera bêjin rastê
Baverke birîya te kîrye
Which I now understood to mean:
How many years am I in prison?
I have seen all types of cruelty and torture
But the biggest torture I have lived
Believe me, it is that I missed you
Did they tell you that I am still alive?
They did not even tell you that I am still alive
Without you, life has no value
Ask these prison walls
They will tell you the truth
Believe me, I missed you
Compare that to all the love songs of the type "oh brown eyed beauty" that singers of other oriental origins use in their compositions, or the "I want to hold your hand" Western artists comes up with!
At that point, I did not yet think of the metaphorical sense of these words, and found these the most hardcore lyrics for a love song I could possibly think of.
A Kurdish friend later explained to me that "you" does not have to be a romantic partner, but should be understood to be freedom herself. So despite all the violence endured, the most terrible of ills inflicted upon the prisoner was the deprivation of freedom.
Back to the actual make-up of the language (things will get a little drier now).Kurdish is a pretty close relative of the one language I engaged on learning in depth before - Persian. As you can think, its affinities with Persian are both help and hinder in the process of learning. Help, because I learn faster. Hinder, because, of course, I get confused.
Always a grammar nerd, I must remark that it was with the Kurdish language that I first came across the loveable grammatical feature of the ergative. While other grammar features, like the use of the ezafe, have their parallels in Persian, the ergative is unique to Kurdish.
The ergative means that the subject of a sentence with an intransitive verb is declined as if it was a direct object (or else, into an accusative case). In Kurdish this is the case only in the past tense. The verb of the sentence then is not conjugated and remains in the third person singular. Something like "us has seen they", instead of "we have seen them" (read more here about "If English was an ergative language").
Among the other languages that have the ergative are some Caucasian languages including Chechen, Burushaski (a mountain language from Pakistan) and Kalaallisut (Greenlandic). That says a lot about what a cool "feature" this ergative is! Sorani apparently misses the feature, whereas Zazaki uses it, too. The only other Indo-European language which uses it is Urdu, which I have also recently started learning.
I will end on a little overview over the various Kurdish dialects: Apart from Kurdmandji Kurdish, there is Sorani Kurdish, spoken by around 10 Million Kurds. These two different dialects of Kurdish, which would be different enough to be classified different languages, are also written in two different alphabets. Sorani Kurdish is spoken in Southern Kurdistan, in a large region overlapping the Iraqi and Iranian borders, and is written in an adapted version of the Arabic script.
Kurmandji Kurdish is spoken in Northern Kurdistan, in an even larger region overlapping Iran, Iraq and Turkey, and can be written both in the Latin or the Arabic alphabet, although only the script in the Latin alphabet has been standardized. As I wrote earlier, this happened only recently, over the past twenty, fifteen years, and in a way is a process that is still going on.
I chose to learn Kurmandji Kurdish as it is spoken in Turkey, a country that I visit a lot, with the added benefit, that the Kurdish there is written in the Latin alphabet which relieves me of the effort to grapple with the foreign Arabic script.
The written script of the Kurmandji Kurdish of the Behdini region of Northern Iraq is a curiosity. I have seen Behdini texts from Northern Iraq written in a mish-mash language based on the adapted version of the Arabic alphabet as used by Sorani, but with a lot of phonetic spelling intermixed into the text, individual adaptations closer to their locally spoken Kurmandji Kurdish. This is comparable to Arabs writing a mixture of a standard Arabic (which is so removed from their actual tongue that they master it imperfectly), and their local dialect.
I should mention that on top of Kurmandji and Sorani, there are two further Kurdish dialects. Interestingly, Gurani, spoken in small enclaves in Western Iran, is said to be close linguistically to Zazaki, as spoken mainly in the Dersim region in Eastern Turkey. I have no idea whether Gurani can be said to be a written language, but I doubt this. Zazaki, like Kurmandji, is written in the Latin script.
Wednesday, May 22, 2013
Sunday, April 28, 2013
Marriage in an Arab Country, then and now
In Tunisia, wedding traditions varied across the regions. In the North-East of the country, in the green, hilly region around Aïn-Draham, Djandouba and Béja, a traditional inland area way from the touristy coast, of mixed populace with both Berber and Arab tribes, the following procedures were the customs for Arab weddings:
At least for the bride, the preparations could last a long time. If possible, she would stay home for three months, eating a lot of couscous and other traditional dishes and moving little, so that she would gain as much body fat as possible. Beauty ideals have since changed, but the traditional marriage dress was designed to look good on grossly overweight women. By staying home and out of the sunlight, the bride would also grow beautifully pale. And all this time inside the house meant she was free to apply facial masks she made with natural ingredients so as to further beautify her skin.
One month into this preparation period, a man or woman whose profession it was to tattoo, would come and draw ornamental lines and crosses under the skin of the bride's forehead and chin, and maybe even onto her cheeks and hands as well. Around Berber tattoos, of which the first ones were made directly after birth, there existed the superstition that they provided protection or good luck. According to my sources Arab tattoos however were apparently carried out only because of aesthetics. However, the practice of applying them fell into disuse already a long time ago, so it is nearly impossible to directly garner information about this anymore. It is extremely rare to come across an elderly woman with tattoos in this region of the country. In other areas, for example around the city Kairouan, the custom persisted for longer, until the beginning of the 1960s.
The last week before the marriage ceremony was a busy one. It was not only the time to write and sign the marriage contract, but the bride also had to go through certain last minute preparations: The seventh day before the marriage, she would visit the hammam with other unmarried girls. Hopefully her luck would rub off, and the girls would find someone with whom to tie the knot soon. Following this, the bride would get an epilation on one day, before having someone come over to embellish her hands and feet with henna drawings on one of the subsequent days. At the same time, the new home would need to be thoroughly cleaned by the bride's female family members, after which the new furniture and any other items needed for living, which were payed by her father, needed to be carried there. The day before the wedding was a day of rest for the bride, while the groom, on the contrary, begun the party making. The guests for the marriage would arrive, and celebrate the "henna night" at the end of which the groom ritualistically dips his pinky into a small receptacle with henna colour.
On the day of the marriage the bride would ride on a white horse to her husband's house. Then, in olden times, it was the tradition for the bride's mother to sit at the bed with her daughter before the groom would arrive. The mother would explain to her daughter what she would have to do. The next day the mother and other female relatives would come again, having made some food for the newly wed.
The modern custom to prepare the the wedding night is to buy sexy lingerie, even though still, certain things need to be explained: Videos with cartoon figures exist which show exactly what will happen.
One of the few ancient traditions that are still observed sometimes, is that of male musicians playing the tabla drum, a large, very loud cylindrical drum hung around the shoulders and hit with a stick on each side, accompanied by the zokra, a simple type of clarinet. In passing I may remark these instruments to be almost the same instruments as are traditionally used during weddings as far away as Turkey and even Pakistan.
Today as in history, men will put on one of the traditional male dresses for the occasion, the kashabia for example, a sort of cloak in villages still fabricated out of wool, but of which now there exist modern versions, usually in white, made out of finer textiles especially for ceremonies like weddings. Maybe on their heads the men will put a shasheïa, the Tunesian name for the red round felt hat which in Turkey is called the fez. This headdress is still regularly seen on the streets in Tunesia.
Even in contemporary times, few families relinquish control of their daughters' lives. Even during their studies for example it is expected that the daughters return each weekend to their parents' house. I was surprised to see the dedication of many mothers who pre-cook their daughters' dinners for the whole week and pack them in Tupperware.
Virginity is still fetishized to the point that most young Tunisian still wait until marriage to have sex. In any but the most conservative families, young people choose their own partners, although most parents retain some sort of veto, many would not accept a non-Muslim husband for their daughters for instance, or, unfortunately, a Black African. It is risky to marry, because divorce still carries a lot of social stigma. If some young heterosexual women choose a life without a partner, it is also because marriage means a great change in the couple's life, it constitutes in fact a total break with their lives before marriage. The two move into a new house, and the custom wants it that everything inside the house, not only the furniture, the curtains, and the tableware, but also the couple's clothes and personal items down to socks or jewelry, is acquired completely new. If a bride keeps her old jeans in their mother's house and picks them up a few weeks after marriage for example, this is already a small act of rebellion against customs, an anecdote recounted with amusement by friends.
At least for the bride, the preparations could last a long time. If possible, she would stay home for three months, eating a lot of couscous and other traditional dishes and moving little, so that she would gain as much body fat as possible. Beauty ideals have since changed, but the traditional marriage dress was designed to look good on grossly overweight women. By staying home and out of the sunlight, the bride would also grow beautifully pale. And all this time inside the house meant she was free to apply facial masks she made with natural ingredients so as to further beautify her skin.
One month into this preparation period, a man or woman whose profession it was to tattoo, would come and draw ornamental lines and crosses under the skin of the bride's forehead and chin, and maybe even onto her cheeks and hands as well. Around Berber tattoos, of which the first ones were made directly after birth, there existed the superstition that they provided protection or good luck. According to my sources Arab tattoos however were apparently carried out only because of aesthetics. However, the practice of applying them fell into disuse already a long time ago, so it is nearly impossible to directly garner information about this anymore. It is extremely rare to come across an elderly woman with tattoos in this region of the country. In other areas, for example around the city Kairouan, the custom persisted for longer, until the beginning of the 1960s.
The last week before the marriage ceremony was a busy one. It was not only the time to write and sign the marriage contract, but the bride also had to go through certain last minute preparations: The seventh day before the marriage, she would visit the hammam with other unmarried girls. Hopefully her luck would rub off, and the girls would find someone with whom to tie the knot soon. Following this, the bride would get an epilation on one day, before having someone come over to embellish her hands and feet with henna drawings on one of the subsequent days. At the same time, the new home would need to be thoroughly cleaned by the bride's female family members, after which the new furniture and any other items needed for living, which were payed by her father, needed to be carried there. The day before the wedding was a day of rest for the bride, while the groom, on the contrary, begun the party making. The guests for the marriage would arrive, and celebrate the "henna night" at the end of which the groom ritualistically dips his pinky into a small receptacle with henna colour.
On the day of the marriage the bride would ride on a white horse to her husband's house. Then, in olden times, it was the tradition for the bride's mother to sit at the bed with her daughter before the groom would arrive. The mother would explain to her daughter what she would have to do. The next day the mother and other female relatives would come again, having made some food for the newly wed.
The modern custom to prepare the the wedding night is to buy sexy lingerie, even though still, certain things need to be explained: Videos with cartoon figures exist which show exactly what will happen.
One of the few ancient traditions that are still observed sometimes, is that of male musicians playing the tabla drum, a large, very loud cylindrical drum hung around the shoulders and hit with a stick on each side, accompanied by the zokra, a simple type of clarinet. In passing I may remark these instruments to be almost the same instruments as are traditionally used during weddings as far away as Turkey and even Pakistan.
Today as in history, men will put on one of the traditional male dresses for the occasion, the kashabia for example, a sort of cloak in villages still fabricated out of wool, but of which now there exist modern versions, usually in white, made out of finer textiles especially for ceremonies like weddings. Maybe on their heads the men will put a shasheïa, the Tunesian name for the red round felt hat which in Turkey is called the fez. This headdress is still regularly seen on the streets in Tunesia.
Even in contemporary times, few families relinquish control of their daughters' lives. Even during their studies for example it is expected that the daughters return each weekend to their parents' house. I was surprised to see the dedication of many mothers who pre-cook their daughters' dinners for the whole week and pack them in Tupperware.
Virginity is still fetishized to the point that most young Tunisian still wait until marriage to have sex. In any but the most conservative families, young people choose their own partners, although most parents retain some sort of veto, many would not accept a non-Muslim husband for their daughters for instance, or, unfortunately, a Black African. It is risky to marry, because divorce still carries a lot of social stigma. If some young heterosexual women choose a life without a partner, it is also because marriage means a great change in the couple's life, it constitutes in fact a total break with their lives before marriage. The two move into a new house, and the custom wants it that everything inside the house, not only the furniture, the curtains, and the tableware, but also the couple's clothes and personal items down to socks or jewelry, is acquired completely new. If a bride keeps her old jeans in their mother's house and picks them up a few weeks after marriage for example, this is already a small act of rebellion against customs, an anecdote recounted with amusement by friends.
Monday, April 8, 2013
Smoking On The Street
To Europeans (although maybe not to American Westerners) smoking on the street may seem an insignificant act, little thought about when done. Yet, for women in Muslim societies and other conservative countries, it is something that is strongly frowned upon. I can illustrate this with a few anecdotes:
An Egyptian-German teenager was hiding from her parents that she was smoking, so she often smoked outside. When on a holiday in Egypt she did the same in Cairo, which created quite a stir; the next time she stepped outside of the house, the shop keepers and street boys had remembered who she was, and they started to intone a melody as she walked past, a singsong to the line "she is smoking cigarettes, she is smoking cigarettes..."
The same person related another anecdote to me: When just having finished smoking in front of the hotel where she was staying in Oran, Algeria, two men walked up to her, starting a simple conversation, "Is there a place in the lobby to have some tea here?". A local friend hurried up to the girl and said, "you better go inside right now, these men think you are a prostitute."
It is probably no accident that in Turkish films, women playing sex workers are oftentimes shown chain-smoking.
I have earlier written about the association of smoking in public and "being a loose girl" in Turkey; "[i]t is weird how I find this so natural when being in more conservative regions by now. Personally, I still do what I want, I drink and smoke in public, but while doing so, I avoid eye contact with anyone of the male segment of society, and if anyone dares to be so impudent as to offer me a cigarette, I for sure send them away with a hostile remark!", I wrote then.
I probably have also earlier noted the irony of how some female Kurdish and Turkish activist friends of mine shy away from smoking on the street because it is seen as reprehensible, but then an hour later they are sitting at home, speaking about taking such drastic measures as taking up arms to change society (all the while zealously chain-smoking). Maybe sometimes we can start the revolution in a smaller way than the violent ways, simply by defying conventions. I think it is the punk-spirit that is lacking in Turkey.
By the way, for example in Tunisia, as elsewhere, I found, that my female friends felt much more comfortable to light up in a café if the foreign girl next to them smoked, too. Smoking in a group in a café is seen as just about acceptable in Tunisia, whereas doing it when waiting on the street is totally out. There is a class factor however; in the richest parts of town smoking in expensive cafés was a prerogative first seized by upper class women most often while simultaneously cuddling lap dogs on their mini-skirts.
In even more conservative Lybia, smoking in cafés is also simply not done, and it is a rare thing even inside the house if in the presence of male friends. Recently I had a conversation with some young male Lybians about this hairy topic. One said to me, "If a female friend smokes in front of us, we do not ask her to stop or anything, but we find it very strange. It feels like something is not right about this. But even so, we sometimes notice that women are smoking outside. In university, they go to a quiet corner, and there they light up. One time two girls were even smoking marijuana! I mean we could not see the joint, they hid it when we walked by, but we could smell it!"
An Egyptian-German teenager was hiding from her parents that she was smoking, so she often smoked outside. When on a holiday in Egypt she did the same in Cairo, which created quite a stir; the next time she stepped outside of the house, the shop keepers and street boys had remembered who she was, and they started to intone a melody as she walked past, a singsong to the line "she is smoking cigarettes, she is smoking cigarettes..."
The same person related another anecdote to me: When just having finished smoking in front of the hotel where she was staying in Oran, Algeria, two men walked up to her, starting a simple conversation, "Is there a place in the lobby to have some tea here?". A local friend hurried up to the girl and said, "you better go inside right now, these men think you are a prostitute."
It is probably no accident that in Turkish films, women playing sex workers are oftentimes shown chain-smoking.
I have earlier written about the association of smoking in public and "being a loose girl" in Turkey; "[i]t is weird how I find this so natural when being in more conservative regions by now. Personally, I still do what I want, I drink and smoke in public, but while doing so, I avoid eye contact with anyone of the male segment of society, and if anyone dares to be so impudent as to offer me a cigarette, I for sure send them away with a hostile remark!", I wrote then.
I probably have also earlier noted the irony of how some female Kurdish and Turkish activist friends of mine shy away from smoking on the street because it is seen as reprehensible, but then an hour later they are sitting at home, speaking about taking such drastic measures as taking up arms to change society (all the while zealously chain-smoking). Maybe sometimes we can start the revolution in a smaller way than the violent ways, simply by defying conventions. I think it is the punk-spirit that is lacking in Turkey.
By the way, for example in Tunisia, as elsewhere, I found, that my female friends felt much more comfortable to light up in a café if the foreign girl next to them smoked, too. Smoking in a group in a café is seen as just about acceptable in Tunisia, whereas doing it when waiting on the street is totally out. There is a class factor however; in the richest parts of town smoking in expensive cafés was a prerogative first seized by upper class women most often while simultaneously cuddling lap dogs on their mini-skirts.
In even more conservative Lybia, smoking in cafés is also simply not done, and it is a rare thing even inside the house if in the presence of male friends. Recently I had a conversation with some young male Lybians about this hairy topic. One said to me, "If a female friend smokes in front of us, we do not ask her to stop or anything, but we find it very strange. It feels like something is not right about this. But even so, we sometimes notice that women are smoking outside. In university, they go to a quiet corner, and there they light up. One time two girls were even smoking marijuana! I mean we could not see the joint, they hid it when we walked by, but we could smell it!"
Friday, April 5, 2013
Critique on the World Social Forum 2013, Tunis
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| Tunisian Anarchists |
The Tunisian revolution was carried out by the highly eduated, unemployed, disaffected youth of the country. Cafés all over are full of young, healthy people with a lot of time on their hands who would have been rather enthusiastic to work for a project like the World Social Forum. In preparation for instance, the campus of Al-Manar university where the forum was to be held needed cleaning up, parts of it had not been used for years and were overgrown. Yet, instead of having recourse to the country's most valuable ressource, its youth, organizers gave cleaning tasks to... the army.
The army, in at first seemingly incongruous manner, was also present on the forum providing security services.
Actually, during the preparation phase of the World Social Forum in Tunisia which just passed, a group of mainly young people with anarchist tendencies were substantially involved with its organization. Only with time, big NGOs, who after the revolution had become flooded with Western subsidies causing a lot of corruption, supplanted the youth movement completely. The anarchist youth call these NGOs, rigid institutions whose members are usually exclusively of the older generation, "the dinosaurs". In European Social Forums of course the crushing presence of NGOs is an unfortunate given.
As for Tunisia, a lot of the costs could have been avoided in several ways; the youth already started to organise free tents from the Red Crescent and the Tunisian scout movement. The eventual organizers decided to accept help from apartheid superpower Saudi Arabia or to hire them from commercial organizations. Entrance prices were five dinar for Tunisians, which can be a lot for the poorest layer of society, and 30 Euros for Europeans.
When, in the autumn of 2012, the youth organized two quite succesful regional forums and a bike caravan across the country in order to publicize the coming "mega-event", the official organ of the forum published a directive not to heed them, something to the extend of "these young people have nothing to do with the actual organizers".
The exclusion of the youth may take different forms in Iraqi Kurdistan, Lybia, Tunisia, or other countries, but it represents a common phenomenon in the extended Middle East. Of course everywhere in the world the future lies with the younger generations, but in this region especially their exclusion from decision-making and problem-solving processes is worrying since according to statistics 60% of these countries' populations are under the age of 30.
Sunday, March 24, 2013
Turkish Baby Talk
In one of MIT professor Steven Pinker’s books, he underpins with many arguments one ancient, never confirmed theory - that language learning is innate. Fitly, the book is entitled "The Language Instinct".
One of the arguments he brings forth goes somehow like this: Compared to other mammals, taking into account proportions of size, females of the homo sapiens species carry their offspring a much shorter time before giving birth. The length of pregnancy derived from analogy with other species should be much closer to something over two years. It is around one and a half years after being born, that children slowly begin to speak. Together with the nine months they spent in their mother's womb, this corresponds roughly to the time-span of what according to this theory a pregnancy "should be". So it is really as if children start to learn to speak right from the start.
This winter I spent a couple of weeks with some Turkish friends and their small daughter Nehir. She was just under two years old, and had just begun to learn her first words. Being around her so intensively for this short time proved to be an interesting experience. It set my mind astir, prompting me to think about several otherwise unconnected things.
For one, I noted a couple of interesting parallels between Turkish child speak, and the child speak of Indo-European (hereafter "IE") languages. The Turkish child speak word for "food" is very close to one of the regular Turkish words for "breast"; food is "mama", while breast is "meme". This proximity can be considered an unsurprising one maybe, although I cannot think of any analogous correlation of sounds between these items of vocabulary in the IE languages that I know.
The most striking thing here for speakers of IE languages certainly is the similarity of these two words to many IE endearment terms for "mother", like German, Greek, Italian or Slavic "mama" or "mamma", French "maman", English and Dutch "mom", etc. pp.
The corresponding Turkish word bears no resemblance, it is "anne".
On the side, whereas the word "anne" is usually traced back etymologically to an Anatolian origin, the word for `father`, ´baba´, etymologically is neither Turkic nor Anatolian, but of Persian origin, and bearing similarity to the child speak words for "father" in many other IE languages.
Moreover, what is interesting about the Turkish child´s speak word for "food", "mama", is its similarity with semantically related words from IE languages. Bulgarian has the reverse, "am-am" for " to eat", where German has "hamm-hamm", which I always thought was onomatopoeic for the sound made when heartily biting into something. Dutch and English have an ionized "yum yum", spelt "jum jum" in Dutch, both words being child speak for "tasty".
Another term her parents used when talking to Nehir was "ata gitmek", "to go out", literally sounding like "to go ata"; 'ata' being a word not usually used. I found this remarkable, because in Southern Germany where I grew up, the child speak term used to say "to go out" or "to go for a walk" is "ata gehen" or "ata ata gehen", "to go ata (/ata ata)."
If anyone has additions or corrections to make, I would be interested to hear them.
Also check out my language blog
One of the arguments he brings forth goes somehow like this: Compared to other mammals, taking into account proportions of size, females of the homo sapiens species carry their offspring a much shorter time before giving birth. The length of pregnancy derived from analogy with other species should be much closer to something over two years. It is around one and a half years after being born, that children slowly begin to speak. Together with the nine months they spent in their mother's womb, this corresponds roughly to the time-span of what according to this theory a pregnancy "should be". So it is really as if children start to learn to speak right from the start.
This winter I spent a couple of weeks with some Turkish friends and their small daughter Nehir. She was just under two years old, and had just begun to learn her first words. Being around her so intensively for this short time proved to be an interesting experience. It set my mind astir, prompting me to think about several otherwise unconnected things.
For one, I noted a couple of interesting parallels between Turkish child speak, and the child speak of Indo-European (hereafter "IE") languages. The Turkish child speak word for "food" is very close to one of the regular Turkish words for "breast"; food is "mama", while breast is "meme". This proximity can be considered an unsurprising one maybe, although I cannot think of any analogous correlation of sounds between these items of vocabulary in the IE languages that I know.
The most striking thing here for speakers of IE languages certainly is the similarity of these two words to many IE endearment terms for "mother", like German, Greek, Italian or Slavic "mama" or "mamma", French "maman", English and Dutch "mom", etc. pp.
The corresponding Turkish word bears no resemblance, it is "anne".
On the side, whereas the word "anne" is usually traced back etymologically to an Anatolian origin, the word for `father`, ´baba´, etymologically is neither Turkic nor Anatolian, but of Persian origin, and bearing similarity to the child speak words for "father" in many other IE languages.
Moreover, what is interesting about the Turkish child´s speak word for "food", "mama", is its similarity with semantically related words from IE languages. Bulgarian has the reverse, "am-am" for " to eat", where German has "hamm-hamm", which I always thought was onomatopoeic for the sound made when heartily biting into something. Dutch and English have an ionized "yum yum", spelt "jum jum" in Dutch, both words being child speak for "tasty".
Another term her parents used when talking to Nehir was "ata gitmek", "to go out", literally sounding like "to go ata"; 'ata' being a word not usually used. I found this remarkable, because in Southern Germany where I grew up, the child speak term used to say "to go out" or "to go for a walk" is "ata gehen" or "ata ata gehen", "to go ata (/ata ata)."
If anyone has additions or corrections to make, I would be interested to hear them.
Also check out my language blog
Monday, March 4, 2013
Lost Ground
Murat Isik says of himself he is Dutch, with a Turkish background. He came to the Netherlands when he was five years old, and says to have "no active memories of Turkey". His family are ethnic Zazakis, which some consider to be a type of Kurd, a view with which Isik disagrees.
Isik's grand-father already was what the Kurmandji Kurds call a çîrokbêj, the singer and story teller of a village, and isik himself muses whether the genes for entertaining others via words were maybe transmitted along the bloodline.
Reviewers were approving his debut novel, "Verloren Grond", "Lost Ground", a family drama set in a village in the disadvantaged East of Turkey. I was very curious and started reading equipped with the best prejudices. However I put the book aside after a few chapters already.
Two of the reason why I abandoned the novel so early on was the predictability of the plot, along with the flatness of the characters.
What Isik chose to write is a "tragic family epos". Tragedy makes for uncomfortable reading anyway, it becomes all the more uncomfortable, if you know what is going to happen next in the unrelenting downward spiral that is detailed in the book. He alludes to developments beforehand, and as I was turning the pages, I was cringing in my seat, being able to anticipate the tragedies that are so obviously going to strike. In this documentary, the author's mother herself admits she cannot read her son's novel for the tears welling up in her eyes: The storyline is based upon her own parents' life. I find it almost voyeuristic how her son uses the potent, true story to create what is supposed to be literature.
I greatly admire artists like Bahman Gobadi who are able to relate the heaviest kind of destinies with the necessery lightness, the humour and quaint anecdotes strewn along the narrative liftening the mood to make things bearable at all.
Then, to me Isik's characters came across cartoon-book style simplistic. Take the village butcher who breaks the family's life apart. Isik styles him as a brute sadist, the epitomy of evil. If the butcher of the village is a psychopath who positively enjoys slaughtering animals and inflicting pain to human beings, what was it that made him this way? Maybe there are moments, when he shows a different side? When he ponders some sort of conflicting feelings that he can only, or not even, admit to himself? Could not the writer relate something that despite the butcher's cruelty could make us tender towards him for a moment? Something that would make him more complex, explain why he acts this particular way? Something that would make him come alive as a person, not as a fairy tale character, in short.
Another reason I forwent reading more chapters is incidentally the same reason for which I could read only a few chapters of that very famous novel set in Afghanistan, "The Kite Runner", that a few years ago supposedly stirred so many hearts around the world. The descriptions of the two oriental countries concerned in both novels I found to be lacking captivating, specific detail that would be more than an acquired cliché about the area of the world written about. Detail not obvious to the superficial observer's eye, something that would show how the writer deeply knows the area and its customs. Isik himself says that he knows Eastern Turkey only from short holidays and the stories of his parents.
The next book Isik is writing on will be set in de Bijlmer, the multi-cultural tower block dominated Amsterdam neighbourhood he grew up in himself. I am pretty curious about this one.
Thursday, February 14, 2013
Valentine's Day
Skipping on Bos en Lommerplein market, I pick up one of the stray plastic bags, and begin scanning the ground for thrown away piece of fruit or vegetable from the market sellers.
"Gel, gel", I hear someone shout. I follow this call to come over in Turkish, but when addressing the man I keep it to Dutch, smiling. He puts a selection of courgettes, bell peppers, some cabagge and cauliflower onto the already emptied stand in front of him. Some are a bit rotten, but if I cook the vegetables today, they will be fine. "Look, ", he turns around and says in Turkish to his collegues, "she is going to take it, we do not have to throw this away!"
At the next stall, the young Egyptian lad who speaks no European language gestures if I have a cigarette. I hand him one, in exchange for grapes, grapes and more grapes. They are fresh and juicy.
Another day, slowly coasting down the avenue on my bike, I stop randomly at the bin in front of a Turkish grocer's. Lid up, head and arm in, hand dangling down to snatch at a few mushrooms, and a bell pepper. The grocer comes out. "What are you doing? Don't do this!" I sheepishly say that I am hungry, what can I do. "In this case, wait!" he admonishes me, and disappears inside the shop. Shortly after he comes back out with bags full of vegetables, bread. One bag full of grapes, which are in season now. He takes another bag and shovels apples into it straight from the shelf, amply. I have to ask him to stop. He does not. He ends up giving me loaves of fresh bread, a bag of courgettes, a bag of aubergine. All fresh. If he gave me, I would rejoiced and this would have been the beginning of one of those great skips that are founded on a personal relationship with the kind owner of a small shop. But here I feel put to shame! Since that day, I do not visit the same shop again. If I accidentally come near the shop when ambling around in the neighbourhood, I change pavements.
Once, at the bridge near our house, there is a Turk feeding the bread he did not sell that day to the ducks. Tobbie and I ask for two pieces, he first refuses, but ends up giving us two loaves and some garlic and sweet potatoes. The fact that we asked for the bird food makes him so pitiful he rummages in his bag to give us supermarket apple cakes he probably just bought for himself. We refuse as heartily as we can, but he does not accept our desperate "no's" and forces them on us.
Anyone who goes skipping has reams of stories like this to share. Let me state clearly, the positive experiences far outweigh the negative ones. But as a woman, some men will always find a way for making your life miserable.
Again at the market, this Tuesday, February the Fourteenth: "Here, you want these?", a kind man says and points me to a tied up bin bag. It turns out to be very heavy. It is full of tomatoes, some a little mushy, all still good. I will take as much as I can easily carry home and make tomato soup. While I am filling the shopping bag I brought, one of the other workers comes over. "You need something? You need something special?" Sounds like a dodgy way of asking, I just ignore the guy. "You have a boy-friend?"I tell him to leave me alone. I carry the bag of tomatoes away from him. He comes after me. As someone going through the rubbish, he sees in me a low class woman, open prey. "You need a boy-friend? You know someone who gives it to you in the night?" I tell him to fuck of. He leaves, but keeps on staring at me from where he is like I am an sub-human being; I am a woman.
I throw some of the most mushy of the tomatoes in his direction. I hit him, but no funny squirting of bright red juice over his face as I had hoped. My male companion that day has arrived on the scene. He was walking aroung on another part of the market, also looking for vegetables. "Hey ho, stop it!", he says to me, when he sees me throw food at others. I disobey, I throw another tomato. "If I punch you once you will lie on the ground. You know what that means?", the guy, who I m soon going to realize is not just "creepy", but outright sick in the head, proffers as an answer, approaching me. This is the most veiled of the rape threats he is going to make. I lunge out at him. He tries to punch me. Daniel rushes over, between us, holding us at arm's length. I have grabbed the guy's jacket by the collar; as I pull it tight I can see he is choking. Daniel stands between us, he is getting punched in the back, while he is trying to keep us apart. But he is looking in my direction. He cannot see that the guy is gagging behind him. He is almost turning blue. Daniel is in fact keeping us apart in a fashion that prevents the other reaching out to me, but I still have the man´s collar. Finally one of the other market workers comes and frees him.
"He is only using words; you should use words too", he shakes his head at me. Well that man did not understand my words at all. Making several explicit rape threats at me, and having punched Daniel pretty hard in the back (punches directed at my face), I consider this person to be a thoroughly disturbed and dangerous individual. I do not doubt that those who rape women walking in the cityparks at night, as happened to a girl I know in the Vondelpark in the summer, are men like him.
The other men around of course were decent human beings, who would never act this way, harass me just for being there. But will they make thsi explicit to him after I leave? It is extremely important that men communicate about these things.
No matter how much women will complain about sexual harassment (and worse things than " just" harassment), it is up to other men to make their stand, give their opinion to individuals like that man. After all, that person will not even listen to women, they are sub-humans to him.
I meant this to be a happy, easy-going post about stories collected from the skips. Then it became a post about sexual harassment.
Because if you are a woman, anything can become a post about sexual harassment.
February the 14th was made international day against violence against women.
"Gel, gel", I hear someone shout. I follow this call to come over in Turkish, but when addressing the man I keep it to Dutch, smiling. He puts a selection of courgettes, bell peppers, some cabagge and cauliflower onto the already emptied stand in front of him. Some are a bit rotten, but if I cook the vegetables today, they will be fine. "Look, ", he turns around and says in Turkish to his collegues, "she is going to take it, we do not have to throw this away!"
At the next stall, the young Egyptian lad who speaks no European language gestures if I have a cigarette. I hand him one, in exchange for grapes, grapes and more grapes. They are fresh and juicy.
Another day, slowly coasting down the avenue on my bike, I stop randomly at the bin in front of a Turkish grocer's. Lid up, head and arm in, hand dangling down to snatch at a few mushrooms, and a bell pepper. The grocer comes out. "What are you doing? Don't do this!" I sheepishly say that I am hungry, what can I do. "In this case, wait!" he admonishes me, and disappears inside the shop. Shortly after he comes back out with bags full of vegetables, bread. One bag full of grapes, which are in season now. He takes another bag and shovels apples into it straight from the shelf, amply. I have to ask him to stop. He does not. He ends up giving me loaves of fresh bread, a bag of courgettes, a bag of aubergine. All fresh. If he gave me, I would rejoiced and this would have been the beginning of one of those great skips that are founded on a personal relationship with the kind owner of a small shop. But here I feel put to shame! Since that day, I do not visit the same shop again. If I accidentally come near the shop when ambling around in the neighbourhood, I change pavements.
Once, at the bridge near our house, there is a Turk feeding the bread he did not sell that day to the ducks. Tobbie and I ask for two pieces, he first refuses, but ends up giving us two loaves and some garlic and sweet potatoes. The fact that we asked for the bird food makes him so pitiful he rummages in his bag to give us supermarket apple cakes he probably just bought for himself. We refuse as heartily as we can, but he does not accept our desperate "no's" and forces them on us.
Anyone who goes skipping has reams of stories like this to share. Let me state clearly, the positive experiences far outweigh the negative ones. But as a woman, some men will always find a way for making your life miserable.
Again at the market, this Tuesday, February the Fourteenth: "Here, you want these?", a kind man says and points me to a tied up bin bag. It turns out to be very heavy. It is full of tomatoes, some a little mushy, all still good. I will take as much as I can easily carry home and make tomato soup. While I am filling the shopping bag I brought, one of the other workers comes over. "You need something? You need something special?" Sounds like a dodgy way of asking, I just ignore the guy. "You have a boy-friend?"I tell him to leave me alone. I carry the bag of tomatoes away from him. He comes after me. As someone going through the rubbish, he sees in me a low class woman, open prey. "You need a boy-friend? You know someone who gives it to you in the night?" I tell him to fuck of. He leaves, but keeps on staring at me from where he is like I am an sub-human being; I am a woman.
I throw some of the most mushy of the tomatoes in his direction. I hit him, but no funny squirting of bright red juice over his face as I had hoped. My male companion that day has arrived on the scene. He was walking aroung on another part of the market, also looking for vegetables. "Hey ho, stop it!", he says to me, when he sees me throw food at others. I disobey, I throw another tomato. "If I punch you once you will lie on the ground. You know what that means?", the guy, who I m soon going to realize is not just "creepy", but outright sick in the head, proffers as an answer, approaching me. This is the most veiled of the rape threats he is going to make. I lunge out at him. He tries to punch me. Daniel rushes over, between us, holding us at arm's length. I have grabbed the guy's jacket by the collar; as I pull it tight I can see he is choking. Daniel stands between us, he is getting punched in the back, while he is trying to keep us apart. But he is looking in my direction. He cannot see that the guy is gagging behind him. He is almost turning blue. Daniel is in fact keeping us apart in a fashion that prevents the other reaching out to me, but I still have the man´s collar. Finally one of the other market workers comes and frees him.
"He is only using words; you should use words too", he shakes his head at me. Well that man did not understand my words at all. Making several explicit rape threats at me, and having punched Daniel pretty hard in the back (punches directed at my face), I consider this person to be a thoroughly disturbed and dangerous individual. I do not doubt that those who rape women walking in the cityparks at night, as happened to a girl I know in the Vondelpark in the summer, are men like him.
The other men around of course were decent human beings, who would never act this way, harass me just for being there. But will they make thsi explicit to him after I leave? It is extremely important that men communicate about these things.
No matter how much women will complain about sexual harassment (and worse things than " just" harassment), it is up to other men to make their stand, give their opinion to individuals like that man. After all, that person will not even listen to women, they are sub-humans to him.
I meant this to be a happy, easy-going post about stories collected from the skips. Then it became a post about sexual harassment.
Because if you are a woman, anything can become a post about sexual harassment.
February the 14th was made international day against violence against women.
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