An arresting footnote

[muckefuck]

When I first looked for mevsufsunuz in my Turkish dictionary, I couldn't find it. It didn't help at all that I was hearing a /t/ in it that wasn't there. But even if I'd had the spelling correct, I would still have been SOL because it seems this particular form has become obsolete. I know what you're thinking--Topkapi isn't even half a century old. But that's the impact of the "catastrophic" pace of language renewal documented so well by Geoffrey Lewis.

In the context of the film, mevsufsunuz is translated as "You are under arrest". So I attacked it from the other direction, by looking up "to arrest" in the English-Turkish section. There I found the phrasal verb tevkif etmek. Etmek is a light verb, frequently used to give verbal force to borrowed nouns (e.g. mat etmek "to checkmate"). Tevkif wears its Arabic origins like a turban and Hans Wehr gives "arrest" among the meanings of توقيف tawqīf, a deverbal from the root w-q-f "stop". From this, it's simple enough to work forward and derive a passive participle of the form mafʻūl, i.e. mawqūf "arrested" (or--in Turkish clothing--mevkuf; -sunuz is simply a vowel-harmonised form of the second-person plural/polite present tense auxiliary ending).

But you'll look in vain for mevkuf in the little violet Redhouse I keep on the bedside table. As we've just seen, adjectives like mevkuf require some familiarity with Arabic morphology to relate to other derivatives of the same stem, and hence have fallen out of currency in a culture where Arabic grammar is no longer commonly studied. Moreover, tevkif etmek itself competes with the native calque tutuklamak (from tutmak "to stop" by means of a derived noun tutuk to which the verb-forming ending -lAmAk has been added).

So there's every chance that if Topkapi were being filmed today, what our hapless hustler would've heard shouted at him would be "Tutuklusunuz!" (Tutuk with the "adjectival" ending -lI plus the suffixed auxiliary mentioned above). That's how much difference a generation or two can make in a land which makes a fetish of linguistic purism.

Comments

[tyrannio.livejournal.com]

Is that the same root as waqf? (I thought the point of a waqf was that it was perpetual, ie that it didn't stop.)

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

From you-know-where: "The legal meaning of Waqf according to Imam Abu Hanifa, is the detention of specific thing in the ownership of waqif and the devoting of its profit or products "in charity of poors or other good objects"." So I guess the idea is that the property is being "stopped" or "arrested" insofar as it's taken out of ordinary circulation and thereafter ceases to change owners.

[richardthinks.livejournal.com]

Ugggghhh. I saw a little bit of the wholesale burning of Turkmen, too. Right now (I am told) Turkmens over the age of 20 can get by in Persian and Arabic in a manner comparable to the way Portuguese folks can get by in Italian... but the new generation must speak "pure Turkmen of our ancestors" and that means no naughty loan words or derivatives that the ancestors have had for 1500 years. And so juice becomes "squeezed..." although when I saw it, they were drinking juice imported from Iran which was called "squeezed" on one side of the pack in Approved Turkmen and "juice" on the other side in latinized Persian.

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

There may yet be hope for Turkmen given that Niyazov was only in power for about fifteen years. After all, his opponents managed to preserve the Cyrillic orthography.

[richardthinks.livejournal.com]

we'll see. I suspect Niyazov did an excellent job of distracting attention away from power - the total lack of any kind of disorder on his death, the orderly election with 6 candidates all promising to "continue his legacy," their pre-selection down to one candidate for presentation to the public...... suggests to me that someone else was actually in power all along, and that someone hasn't changed yet.

Also I firmly believe that nothing is too stupid for nationalism.