Travelling was fun while it lasted, but I’ve now been back for as long as I was away.
In a recent lesson with a man in his late forties, I discussed the phenomenon of shifting stress patterns as suffixes are added to certain English words. By stress here, I mean accent, or emphasis. For instance, photograph has stress on the first syllable, photographer on the second, and photographic on the third. The trio of politics/political/politician behaves in the same way. I then mentioned that there are sets of Romanian words that do the same thing, citing barbă (beard), bărbat (man), and bărbăție (manliness). He then said, hang on, barbă and bărbat have nothing to do with each other. He was wrong – even though he’d never made the connection in over 45 years of speaking Romanian, they absolutely are related. The interesting thing though is that as a native speaker he had no need to ever make the connection, whereas the link was handy for me as a learner: barbă is beard, bărbat is a bearded person, in other words a man. It’s just like how native French speakers don’t think “earth apple” when they hear pomme de terre (potato), or “small lunch” for petit déjeuner (breakfast), or “sixty-thirteen” for soixante-treize (seventy-three). (As an aside, the name Barbados means “bearded ones”, although people are unsure whether that refers to actual people or a species of bearded fig tree.)
One thing I love about long-haul travel (on the rare occasions I do it) is that I get to see other languages. I dealt with Māori in the first two posts in this series. Indonesian (at Singapore Airport) was a fun one. Air minuman, which sounds like an airline for Hobbits, just means drinking water. But two languages that became friends of sorts were Hungarian and Turkish.
Hungarian is a deceptive beast. It’s part of the Uralic language family that includes Finnish and Estonian, but it went off at a pretty steep tangent many centuries ago, and now bears little resemblance to anything else. It’s written in the familiar Roman alphabet but no matter how hard I stare at it, I can’t get a reading. Even words that you expect to be almost the same everywhere, like restaurant, are completely different. The spelling is phonetic but it has some unusual traits. The letter s on its own represents the English sh sound, while sz denotes the s in silly. Weird, right? (Hungarian zs represents the final sound of massage, while cs denotes the ch in chips.)
Hungarian has a feature called vowel harmony whereby front vowels (vowel sounds created with your tongue near the front of your mouth) go together in the same word, and likewise back vowels. You can’t mix them. (More or less. I’m sure it’s more complicated than that.) Hungarian has no grammatical gender, just like English, but it seems to have pretty much everything else, such as a whole bunch of case endings. Plurals work in an interesting way. Both singular and plural nouns exist, but when you mention a number you always use the singular: “look at the horses” but “five horse”. In a way, this makes sense: as soon as you say five you know it’s plural, so you don’t repeat that fact. On that arduous journey to Budapest I had rather too much opportunity to try and pronounce the names of stations my train pulled in at: Tápiószentmárton. Sülysáp. That last one – s is pronounced sh, remember – is something like shooey-shap.
Turkish was roughly as difficult as Hungarian to make head or tail of. Interestingly, although it is from a different family to Hungarian, both languages happen to share both vowel harmony and lack of grammatical gender. For over 600 years under the rule of the Ottoman Empire, Turkish was written using a form of Arabic. In 1928 under Atatürk – the great reformer – Arabic was replaced by a version of the Roman alphabet with a few extra dots and squiggles to accommodate Turkish phonology. This was a great success: literacy rates shot up and the economy grew. It’s hard to criticise a reform that paid such dividends, but after staring at a few Turkish signs I felt they could have done a better job.
In the last year or two there has been a push by the Turkish government for the country to be called Türkiye in English, not Turkey. No more birds. I’m not a fan, to put it mildly. Who are they to dictate what we call it in English? I don’t see the German government telling us to call Germany Deutschland. Then there’s the question of pronunciation. Turkey-yay? Turkey-yeah? Then there’s the spelling. Think Türkiye has just one awkward letter, the u with an umlaut? Think again. That innocuous-looking i causes all kinds of headaches. You see, Turkish has both a dotted and a dotless i (ı). The dotted one is the standard i sound you find everywhere, as in the Italian vino. The dotless one is a less common sound, similar to the vowel in Romanian în but with the tongue further back. So that the distinction is always maintained, the dotless i stays dotless in both upper and lower case, and the dotted one retains its dot even in upper case. I realised this when I saw a sign at Istanbul that read VISIT TÜRKİYE. (Istanbul, by the way, is İstanbul in Turkish.) This whole business of dotted and dotless i could have been avoided with one or two different choices a century ago. I for one will avoid all this hassle and keep calling Turkey Turkey.
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