TAC - voron (Turkish, Kurdish, Arabic)

[vijayjohn]

No problem! I posted that song on the Arabic forum once but along with a whole bunch of other songs, so it was kind of hidden. This blog post has the lyrics with what looks to me like a reasonably complete explanation of what they mean.

[voron]

This blog post has the lyrics with what looks to me like a reasonably complete explanation of what they mean.

Thanks for reminding me about this resource. This should be helpful for my Egyptian Arabic studies.

Also I looked around this blog a bit, and I found that it is compiled by a (seemingly) Francophone person named Christopher Gratien, who studied Arabic for his MA, did PhD in Ottoman history at Georgetown University, is now doing a Postdoc at Yale, and also has a similar blog which teaches Turkish through music, a blog about Istanbul (where he stayed or has been staying as a part of his research), and a blog about Ottoman history.

Sorry Chris for exposing your biography but you seem to be a very interesting person, so I wanted to know more about you.

Here's his Turkish blog:
http://www.tuned-in-turkish.com/

EDIT: This guy has a blog about Armenian, too!
http://www.hayalis.com/

[vijayjohn]

Yeah, I remember seeing his Turkish blog. I didn't know he spoke French, though (or forgot).

[voron]

I just discovered this film which looks fantastic:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Way_to_School

It is a documentary about a Turkish teacher who worked in a primary school in a Kurdish village where children had problems speaking Turkish. Turkish wiki says the shootings were completely 'natural', so that the director would come for 10 days a month, during 10 months, to the village, and shot the classes without writing any script or asking to repeat any scenes.

I skimmed through the film and it shows parts where children cannot understand simplest questions like "what is your name?", "do you understand me?", and then later on they start talking and reading in Turkish. I can't wait to watch it in full.

(And it's definitely not because children are shy or something. There are still villages in Turkey where children can't speak Turkish until they go to school. I have a friend with this kind of background).

[eskandar]

I watched that film years ago and remember liking it. Should be very interesting for you to see how much you can understand of the Kurdish the kids speak!

[voron]

Should be very interesting for you to see how much you can understand of the Kurdish the kids speak!

I finally had time to watch it. It was cool, I liked it a lot. Yeah it shows a lot of poverty but I kinda got used to seeing it in Turkey, and I also saw that there is no necessarily a correlation between money and happiness. The linguistic situation when not only kids but even some adults who come to the parents' meeting cannot speak Turkish, so that they need translation, is surreal.

My favourite part was probably when the teacher complaint at the meeting:
- Abdullah doesn't bring a pen to the lessons, so when I ask him "Do you have a pen?", he says "Na", which I suppose means "No" in Turkish, -
and the parents burst out laughing, and one of them remarks:
- You see, you are also learning a new language here.

Yes I could understand the kids' and adults' Kurdish more or less well (partly because I could guess from the context).

[vijayjohn]

"Na", which I suppose means "No" in Turkish

You mean Kurdish?

[voron]

"Na", which I suppose means "No" in Turkish

You mean Kurdish?

Na, I mean Turkish. It was a quotation of what the teacher said. In Turkish he said: 'Na' da Türkçe 'hayır' demek galiba.

Wait I'll correct the formatting of my post to make it clearer.
Corrected. Is it any better? I suck at punctuation.

[vijayjohn]

Oh OK, that makes sense now. Thanks!

[eskandar]

The linguistic situation when not only kids but even some adults who come to the parents' meeting cannot speak Turkish, so that they need translation, is surreal.

I guess in a country like Belarus, with nearly universal literacy and a very homogeneous society, such a thing would probably be unheard of. In rural parts of Iran it's not so uncommon to find Kurds, Azeris, or other minorities ignorant of Persian. In the US the dynamic is typically the reverse: among immigrant families, kids usually know English (because they go to school) but in parts of the country you can find many adults who don't know English (and would need translation in similar settings) who are sequestered in immigrant enclaves where everyone speaks Spanish, Chinese, Persian, or whatever.

[voron]

I guess in a country like Belarus, with nearly universal literacy and a very homogeneous society, such a thing would probably be unheard of.

Yes. One of the biggest shocks for me in Turkey was when I first met a person who couldn't read or write (a man in his 40s). I just gasped. My first thought was, how he could even survive. Later I got to know many more such people. It is especially common among elderly women in the East.

[vijayjohn]

I've seen and met lots of illiterate people in India. I've even lived with or made friends with some of them. In India, servants, beggars, and other people who do menial jobs for the middle class are typically illiterate. In Kerala, this is less common, but it still happens. (It's also been slowly changing for the better elsewhere in the country, it seems).

The lady who used to take care of my grandmother was (and most likely still is) semi-literate. My dad has brought me lots of interesting things from India, but one of the most interesting things was one of her shopping lists. I wish I remembered where the hell I put it!

In the US the dynamic is typically the reverse: among immigrant families, kids usually know English (because they go to school) but in parts of the country you can find many adults who don't know English (and would need translation in similar settings) who are sequestered in immigrant enclaves where everyone speaks Spanish, Chinese, Persian, or whatever.

Sometimes you can find adults like this even when they're not in immigrant enclaves per se. My next-door neighbors whose house I can barely see part of out of my window right now used to include a few old people who spoke very little English if any.

[voron]

I've started doing the book "Living Arabic". It teaches both MSA and Jordanian dialect.
https://www.amazon.com/Living-Arabic-Co ... 0974484342

I'm currently at chapter 15 out of 55. I have 41 chapters to go which I could probably complete in 2 months if I studied regularly, but more realistically I'll be happy if I finish it by the New Year.

Also, I'll try again to use an SRS (Memrise in my case).

I watched a few Turkish films recently: Takva, Güneşi Gördüm, Ay Lav Yu.

I've translated a part of a Kurdish fairy tale in my thread on the Kurdish subforum.
viewtopic.php?f=72&t=47014#p1084279

[הענט]

I've started doing the book "Living Arabic". It teaches both MSA and Jordanian dialect.
https://www.amazon.com/Living-Arabic-Co ... 0974484342

I'm currently at chapter 15 out of 55. I have 41 chapters to go which I could probably complete in 2 months if I studied regularly, but more realistically I'll be happy if I finish it by the New Year.

Also, I'll try again to use an SRS (Memrise in my case).

I watched a few Turkish films recently: Takva, Güneşi Gördüm, Ay Lav Yu.

I've translated a part of a Kurdish fairy tale in my thread on the Kurdish subforum.
viewtopic.php?f=72&t=47014#p1084279

Ay Lav Yu reminds me of the Spanish movie Biutiful that I watched for language learning purposes. To this day I can't make up my mind about which dialect to learn.

P.S. I just discovered the etymology for Yunanistan. I love those moments when it suddenly makes sense.

[voron]

Ay Lav Yu reminds me of the Spanish movie Biutiful that I watched for language learning purposes. To this day I can't make up my mind about which dialect to learn.

You mean, which dialect of Spanish?

[הענט]

Ay Lav Yu reminds me of the Spanish movie Biutiful that I watched for language learning purposes. To this day I can't make up my mind about which dialect to learn.

You mean, which dialect of Spanish?

Yes. It's basically switching between a couple of different consonant sounds and words. That's why it's so easy unlike going from Lebanese Arabic to Moroccan. I prefer Mexican Spanish, but many books in Americas are an amalgam of Latin American dialects (accents) and European Spanish is prevalent here in Europe.

[eskandar]

I've started doing the book "Living Arabic". It teaches both MSA and Jordanian dialect.
https://www.amazon.com/Living-Arabic-Co ... 0974484342

Looks interesting - I'm looking forward to seeing how you end up liking it.

[voron]

Looks interesting - I'm looking forward to seeing how you end up liking it.

I absolutely love it.

Each lesson has a colloquial and an MSA part. Every text has an audio recording, and the dialogues in the colloquial part have videos which are acted out on location in Jordan.

The vocabulary is very relevant. I am now at lesson 18 out of 55 (I skipped first 14 lessons or so, they were too easy) and I've already learnt a bunch of useful vocabulary, for example:
Colloquial:
ضيّعت - I lost
خلّيت - I left (e.g. my bag) (I knew this verb in خلينا - let's, but I didn't realize it means "to leave" on its own)
صحيت - I woke up
قعدت - I sat down (I knew its imperative from Pimsleur but wasn't comfortable with other forms)

MSA (MSA portions of the book contain texts about the Arabic world):
literacy rate - نسبة المتعلمين
climatic areas - مناطق مناخية
Yemen borders on Oman from the East - يحد اليمن من الشرق عمان

As you see, the colloquial vocabulary is just what you need in colloquial situations, and the MSA one is what you are likely to expect in news and encyclopedic articles.

Also, I'm learning common knowledge from this book. For example it surprised me with the low literacy rates in Yemen (72% for men and only 29% for women).

One limitation of the book is that it doesn't even attempt to teach all intricacies of the MSA declensions and conjugations. So far I only saw it mentioning those noun cases which have graphic distinction (accusative singular indefinite and accusative for sound plurals). So if one's goal is learning puristic MSA, this book is definitely not for them.

Let's see if my overall opinion about the book changes as I go on studying from it.

[voron]

Let me rant a bit about borrowings from Arabic in Turkish.

I'm reading a text about Saudi Arabia from the book "Living Arabic", and it has the expression اكتشاف البترول - oil discovery.

اكتشاف sounds like a word that could perfectly exist in Turkish (as iktişaf), but it doesn't. Instead, Turks use keşif - which apparently comes from the same root (it's a masdar of another wazn, I suppose).

Or, let's take Persian Gulf. In Arabic it's apparently الخليج العربي - Arabian Gulf (ok, makes sense). In Turkish, there is the word haliç (the famous inlet in Istanbul is called Haliç), but no, Turks call it Basra Körfezi (so it's neither Persian nor Arabic).

Why can't you guys borrow consistently?

[eskandar]

The book sounds great!

Instead, Turks use keşif - which apparently comes from the same root (it's a masdar of another wazn, I suppose).

My guess is that it comes from كشف kashf which is the maSdar of the basic form I verb.

Or, let's take Persian Gulf. In Arabic it's apparently الخليج العربي - Arabian Gulf (ok, makes sense). In Turkish, there is the word haliç (the famous inlet in Istanbul is called Haliç), but no, Turks call it Basra Körfezi (so it's neither Persian nor Arabic).

I thought for sure this had to be an "Öz Türkçe" neologism but I looked at an Ottoman map and yup, there it is: بصره کورفزی !