{"id":38036,"date":"2011-07-23T11:42:11","date_gmt":"2011-07-23T08:42:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.turkishforum.com.tr\/en\/content\/?p=38036"},"modified":"2023-04-04T08:44:00","modified_gmt":"2023-04-04T05:44:00","slug":"the-guzel-but-zor-turkish-language","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/2011\/07\/23\/the-guzel-but-zor-turkish-language\/","title":{"rendered":"The G\u00fczel but Zor Turkish Language"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n
Editor’s Note: Happy to post the following travelogue from our well-traveled Senior Lutheran Correspondent Jon Pahl, whose book Empires of Sacrifice: The Religious Origins of American Violence, recently published by NYU Press, <\/em>was the subject of discussion and an interview on our blog.<\/em><\/div>\n

Over the past several months Jon has been spanning the globe from Indonesia to Turkey, perhaps still licking his wounds from the suffering I administered to him on the basketball courts of Valparaiso, Indiana back in the early 90s. He sends along the following reflections on his experiences in Istanbul. This is a little bit off the usual topics for our blog, but consider this some lazy summer blog reading, like a Calvin Trillin essay in the New Yorker. <\/em><\/p>\n

by Jon Pahl, in Istanbul<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

In 1880, Mark Twain published an essay destined to be famous. \u201cThe Awful German Language,\u201d in A Tramp Abroad<\/em>, lampooned the difficulty Twain experienced learning German. It is very funny. I remember laughing out loud to the point of tears the first time I read it, at Regenstein Library of The University of Chicago.<\/p>\n

Twain\u2019s essay comes to mind because I have been living in Istanbul for two weeks trying to learn some Turkish. In Turkish, as in German, verbs come at the end of sentences, and word order is generally reversed from English. This makes Turkish difficult (zor<\/em>). But the language is also beautiful (g\u00fczel<\/em>). Twain hit more than a few ethnocentric notes in his piece, and it clearly reflects, in retrospect, the stereotype that eventually became \u201cthe ugly American.\u201d The essay\u2019s humor mutes its xenophobia, but \u201cThe Awful German Language\u201d also reveals a moment in time when America\u2019s empire began to swing into power.<\/p>\n

My own take on Turkish, as a twenty-first century American, is quite different from Twain\u2019s take on German in the nineteenth century\u2014and not only because I lack his satirical gifts. I am studying the language as I begin research for an English language biography of the influential but controversial Turkish imam Fethullah G\u00fclen. My experience of the language invariably is filtered through my reading of G\u00fclen\u2019s Sufi-inspired thought.<\/p>\n

Contemporary Turkish is a modern creation. It emerged along with the Republic in the early twentieth-century, and it was a cornerstone in Ataturk\u2019s attempt to unify (and imagine) a new nation as the Ottoman Empire crumbled. I have argued elsewhere (in a review of Orhan Pamuk\u2019s The Museum of Innocence<\/em>\u2014see <\/em> that Turkey\u2019s post-imperial reality offers many lessons for Americans. Some of the most profound of the things we might learn from Turkey may be revealed in the structure and harmonies of the language. I make no claim that these structures are unique to Turkish, but they can help me articulate six insights I have noted in the course of living here in Istanbul for a brief stretch.<\/p>\n

First, in Turkish, relationships trump subjective assertions. Subjects and objects are juxtaposed in most sentences. This makes the relationship between subject and object primary, and the action of an individual secondary. The subject of a sentence, such as \u201cI,\u201d is often dropped completely and embedded within a verb. For instance, take the verb sevmek<\/em>, \u201cto love.\u201d To say \u201cI love you\u201d one can <\/em>say \u201cBen seni seviyorum\u201d (literally, \u201cI you love\u201d). But more frequently one would hear simply: \u201cSeni Seviyorum.\u201d Here, the \u201cI\u201d doing the loving is not the primary thing; the \u201cI\u201d is embedded within the love (as the ending, \u201cum.\u201d) Despite Atat\u00fcrk\u2019s attempt to extinguish Sufism in Turkey, I am willing to wager that this linguistic structure reveals the deep influence of Sufi Islam\u2014historically important across Turkey. For Sufis, the ego is illusion. There is no \u201cyou and me,\u201d but there are moments in time marked by relationships, and, ideally, by love.<\/p>\n

Secondly, there is a poetic rhythm to Turkish that reflects what I have taken to calling \u201coral mimesis,\u201d and in which I find a sign of the famous Turkish hospitality that I have experienced on all four of my visits here. The most evident form of this feature of Turkish is called \u201cvowel harmony.\u201d Endings to adjectives and verbs that convey the nature of a relationship (like that \u201cum\u201d in seviyor<\/em>) vary depending upon the last vowel in a word. Thus, to add an \u201cI\u201d to a transitive verb might mean adding um, im (eem), \u00fcm (yewm), or \u0131m (uhm), depending on the last verb preceding the ending. I\u2019m barely beginning to figure this out after two weeks of study, but what it produces is a rhyming quality to the language that means sounds mirror each other. Thus, for example, the adjective \u201cg\u00fczel\u201d takes \u201ci\u201d (pronounced like the long English \u201c-e\u201d) for its endings. This means that if I wanted to say \u201cYou are beautiful\u201d (something I\u2019ve often thought here in Istanbul!) I might say: \u201cSen g\u00fczelsin\u201d (phonetically\u2014\u201csen gew-sel-seen\u201d). I think that has a very nice ring to it. Such oral (and aural) mimesis is common throughout the language, in manifold everyday exchanges and encounters. It\u2019s like a smile returning a smile, linguistically, and builds into ordinary language a verbal form of hospitality.<\/p>\n

Thirdly, assigning of gender is not primary in Turkish. Unlike in German, nouns don\u2019t take genders, and the third person singular pronoun \u201co\u201d can mean either \u201che, she, or it.\u201d I know that for some Turkish feminists there is a sense that masculine is the default gender. For instance, Mustafa Kemal is honored with the name \u201cAtat\u00fcrk\u201d (\u201cFather of the Turks\u201d). There is not, so far as I know, a similar equivalent for women (the \u201cMother of the Turks?\u201d) But in the structure of the language, identity is grounded in something other than in gender. This lack of gender differentiation was clearly part of Atat\u00fcrk\u2019s modernization project\u2014which might explain in part why issues such as veiling continue to be so contested in contemporary Turkish society, as Pamuk\u2019s novel Snow<\/em> vividly explores. One of my American Muslim students explained to me that she wore the hijab <\/em>because \u201cI want people to see me as a Muslim before they see me as a woman.\u201d But in Turkey, wearing the veil has actually become an assertion of gender differentiation\u2014and hence, a counter-cultural statement. The language, at least as I understand it so far, however, implies structural equality.<\/p>\n

Fourthly, Turkish operates by what one of my teachers (a Ukrainian named Tarkan) called \u201cmathematical logic,\u201d but in which I see a military precision that produces a guarded (if not conspiratorial) mentalit\u00e9<\/em> that competes with the hospitality I alluded to earlier. My brain hurts after three hours of Turkish class, not only because I have little skill at mathematics, but also because the calculus is so complex that my efforts to intuit \u201cthe answers\u201d are frustrated by the intensity of the process. Such intensity, and a less-than-transparent set of rules to govern it, marks one of the challenges contemporary Turkey faces in its efforts to \u201cdemocratize.\u201d The military is often described as the \u201cguardian\u201d of modern Turkey. Some people here are worried about how religion (notoriously NOT mathematically precise) might undermine this custodial responsibility. Whether a balance can be struck between the poetic intuitions and revelations of, say, The Holy Qur\u2019an<\/em>, and the guarded, militarily precise structures that are embedded in modern Turkish may hold the key to the most hotly debated questions in the country today. The optimistic answer is that the debates are<\/em> underway. But recent imprisonments of military leaders and journalists, and recurrent brutal (and covert) military coups over the course of the twentieth-century, suggest that a balance between poetic trust and military security will not be easy to achieve. If, however, Turkey effectively forges a new Constitution (as is proposed under the current government), and if a way is found to welcome Turkey into the European Union as its first majority Muslim nation, then the case for Turkey as a model for the kind of societies that might emerge from \u201cthe Muslim Spring\u201d will surely be strengthened.<\/p>\n

Fifth, as the tension between hospitable and conspiratorial mentalities might suggest, Turkish seems to me to embrace opposites in often paradoxical ways. As someone who has written a book with the word paradox in its title (Paradox Lost<\/em>), I might rightly be accused on this point of reading something into the language that\u2019s not there. But I don\u2019t think this is merely a projection. In a review session with another one of our beloved teachers, named Musa, we spent nearly an hour tracing the various opposites we had learned together over two weeks: burada-\u015furada<\/em>, \u201chere-there;\u201d s\u0131cak-so\u011fuk<\/em>, \u201chot-cold;\u201d sol-sa\u011f<\/em>, \u201cleft-right,\u201d and so forth.<\/p>\n

As it happens, in my spare time I\u2019m reading a novel by the Turkish feminist author Elif Shafak. The book is entitled The Forty Rules of Love: A Novel of Rumi. <\/em>It\u2019s a fabulous read. The evening after our review of opposites in the classroom, I came across the following passage, which Shafak places in the mouth of Rumi, the 13th<\/sup> century Sufi: \u201c\u2019God created suffering so that joy might appear through its opposite,\u2019 Rumi said. \u2018Things become manifest through opposites. Since God has no opposite, He remains hidden.\u2019\u201d Here, the \u201cnatural\u201d human tendency to frame opposites (joy-suffering, friend-enemy, Christian-Muslim) gives way to a Turkish Sufi tendency to transcend them.<\/p>\n

For one last way to clarify this point, consider the poem Bedava<\/em>, by the early twentieth-century Istanbul poet Orhan Veli. I was taught the poem by a group of Polish students who were studying with me (our class is a veritable United Nations\u2014with students from Italy, Spain, Nigeria, Kenya, Cameroon, Syria, Singapore, Serbia, and Poland\u2014among others). Everyone I\u2019ve asked in Istanbul knows Bedava<\/em>, including the cleaning ladies in my hotel. I\u2019ll include the Turkish first, then offer a translation:<\/p>\n

Bedava ya\u015f\u0131yoruz, bedava; <\/em><\/p>\n

Hava bedava, bulut bedava;
\nDere tepe bedava;
\nYa\u011fmur \u00e7amur bedava;
\nOtomobillerin d\u0131\u015f\u0131,
\nSinamalar\u0131n kap\u0131s\u0131,
\nCamek\u00e2nlar bedava;
\nPeynir ekmek de\u011fil ama
\nAc\u0131 su bedava;
\nKelle fiyat\u0131na h\u00fcrriyet,
\nEsirlik bedava;
\nBedava ya\u015f\u0131yoruz, bedava.<\/em><\/p>\n

For free we live, for free;
\nThe air is for free, the clouds are for free;
\nValleys and hills for free;
\nThe rain, the mud, for free;
\nThe outside of cars,
\nThe doors of the cinemas
\nThe shop windows for free;
\nBread and butter aren’t free but still water is for free;
\nFreedom can cost your head,
\nImprisoned for free;
\nFor free we live, for free.<\/p>\n

The lines just before the end are the paradoxical kicker. What seems to be a nice, romantic ode to the clich\u00e9 that \u201cthe best things in life are free\u201d in fact embraces a somber warning. Freedom might cost us our \u201cheads.\u201d We could be imprisoned, \u201cfor free.\u201d The affirmations of the opening lines gradually give way, as modern consumerism and (implicitly) the State takeover, to a fatalistic prospect that is only redeemed with hope in the last line.<\/p>\n

Bedava<\/em>, then, does not simply mean \u201cfreedom\u201d in a political sense (the Turkish word for that is H\u00fcrriyet<\/em>). And, in the context of the poem, I am tempted to translate Bedava <\/em>as something like \u201cbound free,\u201d \u201ccaptive free,\u201d or a similar paradox. It is this conjunction of hope and fatalism that I find intriguing and promising both in the structure of the language, and in Turkish culture.<\/p>\n

Finally, then, what I have learned so far is that Turkey might be a budding model of the post-modern reconciliation of secularity and religion. It is too simple to call this simply \u201cSufism;\u201d Turkey\u2019s economic growth of 11% in the last quarter depended on some quite secular practices. Yet the practices of hizmet<\/em> (service) among those inspired by Fethullah G\u00fclen bridge secular and sacred modes of life. For example, Turks inspired by G\u00fclen have built schools in more than eighty countries, including in some of the poorest places on earth. These schools follow the secular curricula of their host countries and embrace both scientific education and interreligious dialogue (I have visited such schools in Africa, Europe, Asia, and North America). What we\u2019re dealing with here is Greg Mortensen\u2019s Thirty Cups of Tea<\/em> without the administrative incompetence (and<\/em> without the publisher\u2019s marketing budget). Such a capacity to juxtapose secularity and spirituality\u2014perhaps woven into the very fabric of contemporary Turkish language and culture\u2014is an important if not vital lesson for Americans, and probably for many others around the world.<\/p>\n

One last set of experiences might clarify the possibilities. Not far from the hotel where I am staying in the borough of \u015ei\u015fli is the local shopping mall\u2014Istanbul Cevahir. Naturally, given my earlier work on malls as modern \u201csacred places,\u201d I had to visit. When I did, I found what I expected: a fountain out front; trees, a bright skylight, and neon inside; and a six-story labyrinthine design with two levels of food courts that quickly got me lost. My disorientation triggered the desire to acquire that malls exist to inspire wherever they are built. I spent way more than I expected in the bookstore.<\/p>\n

And yet, barely a block away from the Cevahir is the \u015ei\u015fli Cami (mosque). It\u2019s a lovely, serene place\u2014in stark contrast to the mall. When I attended early afternoon prayer last Sunday (since my plans to attend a local church fell through), well over a hundred brothers participated. As is customary, we washed at the ablution fountain just outside the mosque, and removed our shoes to go inside. After the prayer ended, I walked out into the mosque courtyard where as I wandered about I noticed a casket shrouded in black cloth laying on a table under a canopy. I had stumbled onto a funeral. Gradually men gathered in lines under the canopy; women stood behind. We were still; silent in respect for one who had died. After a few minutes, and a few prayers, people began to drift away, and I joined them.<\/p>\n

The coexistence of these two places\u2014of bumptious commerce that invites unlimited desire and quiet prayer that acknowledges the limit of death\u2014signals a juxtaposition of the secular and sacred that all humans struggle to negotiate. How these two places co-exist in Istanbul became somewhat clearer to me one day last week. After our three hour morning class, with my brain still throbbing, I set out for Ayasofya (Hagia Sophia). As I walked through the massive gates, onto the ancient stone floors, under the stunning dome, I imagined the prayers of my ancestors in the Christian faith rising like incense for well over a millennium in this very spot.<\/p>\n

Then, that night I attended a concert at Istanbul Open Air Theater. This performance space is built like a Roman amphitheater into the side of a hill, with a lovely view over the Bosphorus. It was a beautiful night with almost a full moon. The concert was sold out, and I couldn\u2019t afford tickets anyway, so I stood on a terrace with a great view overlooking the theater, for free. I could hear fine. I was joined by the four Polish students from my class, and there we met a fascinating architect and Istanbul resident who described himself as a pagan Communist Muslim environmentalist.<\/p>\n

The evening\u2019s concert\u2014part of the 2011 Istanbul Jazz Festival–culminated in a 90 minute set by Natalie Cole, who sang one of my favorite songs: \u201cThis Will Be.\u201d By then, I was in the theater\u2014having walked in, for free, and under the guidance of my new friend, to a seat about 20 rows from the front. I sang along with Natalie Cole, as did many of the three thousand who were in attendance, perhaps in a language they understood no more than I understand Turkish: \u201cThis will be, an everlasting love. . . .\u201d It was, in the words of another song Cole performed, unforgettable.<\/p>\n

Somehow, between the mall and the mosque and Ayasofya and \u201cThis Will Be\u201d in a Roman-like amphitheater in the ancient city of Istanbul, it all seemed to come together. Maybe it was just the nearly full moon, and the great music, and the beer a friendly vendor sold to us while standing on the terrace. But I couldn\u2019t help but think that somehow in this fascinating conjunction of experiences lay the possibilities for much of the rest of the world, even as I continue to struggle to learn the g\u00fczel<\/em>, but zor<\/em>, Turkish language.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

<\/span><\/div>\n

Posted by Paul Harvey<\/abbr><\/p>\n

http:\/\/usreligion.blogspot.com\/2011\/07\/guzel-but-zor-turkish-language.html<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Editor’s Note: Happy to post the following travelogue from our well-traveled Senior Lutheran Correspondent Jon Pahl, whose book Empires of Sacrifice: The Religious Origins of American Violence, recently published by NYU Press, was the subject of discussion and an interview on our blog. Over the past several months Jon has been spanning the globe from […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":83,"featured_media":38037,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[89],"tags":[2597,3576],"class_list":["post-38036","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-turkey","tag-learn-turkish","tag-rumi"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38036","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/83"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=38036"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38036\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/38037"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=38036"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=38036"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=38036"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}