İyi Ramazanlar! Sundown tonight will be the start of the Islamic holy month of Ramadan, so if you’re observing the fast then Ramazan mübarek olsun, and if you’re just interested in reading more then please enjoy my past writing on the topic.
Category Archives: Language Notes
Mevlid-i Şerif
The Prophet Muhammad’s birthday only comes once a year…on the Islamic calendar, that is. Every so often, though, it comes twice a year on the solar Gregorian calendar. It just so happens that this is one of those years, and today is the second occurrence of Mevlid-i Şerif in 2015. Happy holiday to Muslims who observe it.
The birthday of the Prophet Muhammad, called Mevlid-i Şerif in Turkish, is being observed today, the 12th of the Hijri month Rabiyülevvel (if you want to be technical about it, the commemoration started at sundown last night, and I guess it’s ended by now in most of the world, but it’s still worth noting). Though not one of the major Islamic holidays, many Muslims do commemorate Muhammad’s birth with decorations and by exchanging small gifts or sweets.
Mevlid is not a universally celebrated holiday, for a couple of reasons. There’s no historical record of the earliest Muslims celebrating Muhammad’s birthday as a special event; the first widespread Mevlid celebration doesn’t appear in the record until the 12th century, though there are records of earlier, smaller observances. So for modern self-proclaimed “fundamentalists” the holiday is an innovation and therefore illegitimate. Honoring a historical figure’s birthday also comes too close to…
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Ramazan 1436
Sundown tonight will be the start of the Islamic holy month of Ramadan for some people around the world (moon observations make it hard to pinpoint these things exactly), so if you’re interested please enjoy my past writing on the topic.
There’s much more about the Islamic holy month of Ramadan, which begins this evening for most Muslims around the world, over on the Arabic blog, if you’re so inclined.
My purpose here is only to give you some Turkish greetings you can offer for the month. If you’ve read that Arabic entry then this will be pretty simple, because we’re just using the same Arabic greetings, albeit with the Persian pronunciation “Ramazan” rather than the Arabic “Ramadan.” These are Ramazan mübarek (you could go with Mübarek Ramazan, also), “Blessed Ramadan!” and Ramazan kerim, “Generous Ramadan!” A more authentically Turkish greeting would be the title of this post: İyi Ramazanlar, “Good Ramadan!”
Turkish numbers III: 11-1000
For the numbers 1-10, please go here.
Whenever I do a unit that covers all three of the languages I blog about, I always end with Turkish. After bouncing back and forth between Latin and Arabic script to do Arabic and Persian, it’s pretty nice to finish up without having to do that. That’s like quadruply true for this unit, because not only do we get to stay in Latin script, but Turkish also has a more logical system when it comes to handling numbers past 10. Where a lot of languages, including Arabic and Persian (and English) have a slightly altered form for the numbers 11-19, or once you get into the hundreds, Turkish does not. It’s as simple as can be. First let’s count by 10s to 100:
- 10 (ten): on
- 20 (twenty): yirmi
- 30 (thirty): otuz
- 40 (forty): kırk
- 50 (fifty): elli
- 60 (sixty): altmış
- 70 (seventy): yetmiş
- 80 (eighty): seksen
- 90 (ninety): doksan
- 100 (one hundred): yüz
- 1000 (one thousand): bin
You may see that I cheated there and skipped straight from 100 to 1000. That’s because Turkish, unlike Arabic and Persian, doesn’t have any special form for even hundreds. As in English, if you want to say “four hundred,” you literally say “four hundred,” or dört yüz, and “seven hundred” is yedi yüz. Likewise, “fifteen” is simply “ten five” or on beş, “sixty-eight” is altmış sekiz, and “one hundred twenty-nine” is yüz yirmi dokuz. That’s it. If you refer back to the lesson on the numbers 1-10 and this lesson, you can put together any number up to a million pretty easily. Hell, this was so easy to write I’ll even throw in the Turkish word for “million” as a bonus. Are you ready? This might be tricky…
Just kidding. It’s milyon. You gotta love Turkish.
Aşure
The holiday of Aşure began at sundown last night. Please enjoy the post I wrote about Aşure last year.
Sundown today marked the beginning of the Islamic holiday known as Aşure (Ashura), commemorated by both Sunni and Shiʿi Muslims but more more deeply honored by the Shiʿa as the anniversary of the martyrdom of Imam Hüseyin (Husayn). This is the tenth day of the month of Muharrem, or in other words the tenth day of the new Islamic year. Please read some of the general information about the holiday at my Arabic site, and then more detail about its history and significance for Shiʿa at my Persian blog.
Kadir Gecesi 1435
Tonight is Kadir Gecesi (“the Night of Power”), the night when tradition says that the first Qurʾānic revelation was given to Muhammad. If you are interested, I hope you will enjoy my post on this subject from last year.
Ramazan 1435
Sundown today marks the beginning of the Islamic holy month of Ramadan or Ramazan. Rather than repeat myself for no particular reason, I will wish Ramazan mübarek to those who are fasting and point anyone who’s interested to last year’s post on the subject.
Did you know that Turkish was the first language? It’s true! Just ask Atatürk!
When the Republic of Turkey was formed from the hollowed out husk of the Ottoman Empire in 1923, one of the problems that its new leaders, including or maybe particularly Mustafa Kemal Atatürk (a surname that was given to him later in life, which means “father of the Turks”), was how to quickly develop a Turkish national identity to energize this new nation-state. There had been movements in favor of embracing the “Turkic” nature of the Ottoman Empire, but these never went anywhere because the emperors and their ministers were trying (and failing, for the most part) to keep the empire together and retain the loyalties of a vast array of peoples, most of whom were not Turkish. Meanwhile there were nationalist movements developing all over the empire in the 19th century, especially in its European provinces (Greece and the Balkans), and later, not fully until World War I, among its large Arab population. But for the most part there was no serious Turkish nationalist movement, because the Turks who ran the empire realized that nationalism was the last thing they wanted to be pushing.
Mustafa Kemal, “Father of the Turks”
After World War I and the collapse of the empire, though, with the empire’s geographic core (and most “Turkish” parts) being reorganized as the new Republic, Turkish nationalism became kind of a Big Deal. Atatürk recognized that a strong national identity was crucial to controlling his new state and keeping it together, not to mention how important it would be in terms of protecting Turkish interests in the post-war geopolitical order in Europe. His new government at Ankara, which had bitterly fought for and won recognition of Turkey’s nationhood during the 1919-1923 Turkish War of Independence, needed to demonstrate that the new Republic could hold together or risk European encroachment. One area where Atatürk and his supporters felt that big gains could be made in defining a uniquely Turkish identity was in the Turkish language. Because Arabic script was still hell for printing in the 1920s and because its vowel-light writing system had made it a fairly bad script for representing the vowel-heavy Turkish language, Atatürk instituted script reform in 1928, which is why modern Turkish is written in Latin, not Arabic, script. He also established the Turkish Language Foundation to research the language, primarily in order to purge the many Arabic and Persian words that had been assimilated into the Turkish lexicon and replace them with “original” Turkish vocabulary, either new words derived from Turkish roots or archaic Turkish words brought back into use and given new relevance.
In the long run this worked, and continues to work, quite well–so well, in fact, that Atatürk’s famous speeches, the ones that Turkish schoolchildren learn, have been translated multiple times over the years to make the language more contemporary and more “Turkish.” But in the short run, it had the effect of making the new, modern Turkish language unintelligible for older Turks who were accustomed to using all those Arabic and Persian words in everyday speech. In order to ease the transition while also doing a little pro-Turk ethnic puffery, the School of Language, History, and Geography at Ankara University hit upon the Güneş Dil Teorisi, or “Sun Language Theory,” by which they asserted that every other human language could be traced back to one Central Asian root, which was (obviously, duh), a proto-Turkic language whose closest contemporary relative was, of course, Turkish. There’s pretty much nothing to this theory apart from some French research (not well-regarded anymore) suggesting that Sumerian hieroglyphs and cuneiform were the first writing systems and an assertion that the Sumerians were Turks from Central Asia. These early Sumerian-Turks, the theory goes, started worshiping the sun, as one might do in their situation, and what became the Sumerian-Turkish language started as ritual chanting in praise of their sun god.
The lack of any real scholarly evidence backing the Sun Language Theory up didn’t stop it from being accepted in Turkey–I mean, it was nice to think that Turkish was the root of every other language, and the problem of so much Arabic and Persian vocabulary in the Turkish lexicon was solved, because, hey, all Arabic and Persian words were ultimately Turkish anyway! Turkish linguists created fanciful Turkish etymologies for all sorts of words, like “God” being derived from the Turkish kut (“blessing”) or the idea that the Turkish okul was actually the root of the Greek word σχολείο and the Latin schola instead of, you know, the other way around. There’s apparently a word for the creation of fake etymologies to support loony theories about linguistic origins, which I didn’t know until I started writing this post. It’s called goropism, which comes from a 16th century dude named Johannes Goropius Becanus, who asserted that some dialect of Dutch was the language spoken in Eden because, and as far as I can tell this is his actual justification, it had more short words in it than either Latin or Greek (hey, it must have made sense to him).
The people who were got the worst end of this whole language reform business were, unsurprisingly, Turkey’s Kurds, who simultaneously had their ethnic identity stripped from them (the Turkish government summarily announced that Kurds were just “Mountain Turks,” whatever the hell that means) and had their Kurdish language (which is a heck of a lot closer to Persian than to Turkish, since the Kurds are, in fact, an Iranian people, not a Turkic one) suppressed and banned from public use.
Aşure
Sundown today marked the beginning of the Islamic holiday known as Aşure (Ashura), commemorated by both Sunni and Shiʿi Muslims but more more deeply honored by the Shiʿa as the anniversary of the martyrdom of Imam Hüseyin (Husayn). This is the tenth day of the month of Muharrem, or in other words the tenth day of the new Islamic year. Please read some of the general information about the holiday at my Arabic site, and then more detail about its history and significance for Shiʿa at my Persian blog.
Bayramınız mübarek olsun
When Ramadan ends, as it will later this week, it is followed by the holiday known in Arabic as the Festival of the Breaking of the Fast, Eid al-Fitr. Turkish has a different name for the same holiday: Ramazan Bayramı or “Ramadan Festival.” I talked a little about the celebration of the festival over at my Arabic blog. As a holiday that follows a month of fasting, it’s not surprising to note that it revolves around food, both eating it and giving it to the less fortunate as charity. Spending time with family is also a big part of the holiday.
Appropriate greetings for the festival are more-or-less Turkish calques on the Arabic “Eid Mubarak” (“Blessed festival”) and “Eid Saeed” (“Happy festival”): Bayramınız Mübarek olsun (“May your festival be blessed”) and Bayramınız kutlu olsun (“May your festival be happy”).
Turkish Word a Day 