The Death of Imagination

I'll have to look again to confirm, but I believe somewhere in Lewis' The Turkish language reform : a catastrophic success (highly recommended!) he mentions something about Turkish iskemle "chair" being taken from "French". I found this curious, since I can't think of any piece of furniture with a French name remotely close to iskemle. Turning it over in my head, however, I was struck by the resemblance to German Schemel "stool"; could both stem from the same source?

In fact they do, but French was not involved. German Schemel is the outcome of a West Germanic borrowing of Latin scamellum, a diminutive of scamnum "bench". Advanced students will recognise in this the source of our own "shambles" (through a much-commented-upon semantic shift of "benches" > "tables for the display of goods, esp. meat" > "slaughtering benches" > "slaughterhouse" > "scene of ruin; mess").

But the Teutons weren't the only ones to find the lure of the word irresistible. Liddell and Scott show that the Latin scamnus was borrowed into Greek as σκάμνος, which they equate in meaning to σκίμπους "small couch; hammock". The regular neuter diminutive would be σκαμνίον, which survives into Modern Greek as σκαμνί "stool". And this--to come full circle--seems to be where the Turks loaned iskemle from. (The phonetics match up well once you allow for a shift of /a/ > /e/--either due to i-umlaut or a need to show the non-uvular quality of the /k/--and dissimilation of /n/ to /l/ after /m/ [cf. informal English "chim(b)ley" for "chimney"].)

The meaning of iskemle, incidentally, seems to be drifting a bit in Modern Turkish. The online dictionary I use defines it as "1. chair (without arms); stool. 2. small coffee table; end table." An image search still brings up mostly chairs (some with arms, the definition be damned), but a more eclectic and experimentally artsy selection than sandalye, the more common term. At least, I assume it's more common based on the fact that this is the title of the entry in the Turkish Wikipedia corresponding to "Chair", and iskemle does not redirect to it.

(And the etymology of sandalye? Wiktionary says "Arapça" [i.e. Arabic], but the only similar term in the Wehr dictionary is sandāl "anvil".)

I stumbled groggy and hungover into the study late this morning to find monshu gung-ho about hiking down to the paint store on Clark to look at paint colours and get some lunch. I was indifferent to the idea of choosing paint, but the idea of getting lunch there implanted itself. So later, when he was groggy due to napping, I decided it was now-or-never and nipped down to Turkish Bakery for Karadeniz pide.

While there, I took advantage of the opportunity to ask the waiter what his word for mie was. He told me that some speakers used hamuz, which literally means "dough", but that the usual word was ekmek içi, which is literally "the inside of bread". He was bemused at my interest in Turkish and question me about it, which led to a bit of rambling on Sertab Erener, Orhan Pamuk, and the Ottomans.

(Then on the way back, I scored some paint chips for monshu at Thybonny because that's just the kind of boyfriend I am.)

About a month ago, I bought a copy of Hürriyet from Turkish Cuisine and Bakery. I tried puzzling it out for a while, but it some became clear that it would be an impossible task without better resources. Now that I have my little lavendar Redhouse, I've pulled it out again and made some headway. I'm hoping to work my way up to the full-page article on Güven Kıraç of Gegen die Wand (or, as the newspaper calls it, Duvara Karşı) fame.

One of the trickier headlines so far has been Dünya Kupası'na Kuş Gribi Tehdidi. The first bit is easy: dünya means "world". -na is the form of the dative case after the possessive suffix, which here takes the form -sı since the stem ends in a low, back vowel. (Turkish has a complicated system of vowel harmony; almost every suffix has multiple forms depending on the nature of the vowels and consonants in the word's stem.) So, literally, "World Cup-its-to". Just for extra confirmation, the initials "FIFA" are sprinkled liberally through the short article.

Kuş is a bird (or, ahem, a part of the anatomy) and tehdidi is the accusative form of tehdit "threat". So, some bird posed a threat to the World Cup. But what the hell is gribi? It can't be a native Turkish word, nor an Arabo-Persian borrowing--they don't come with initial clusters like that. Only Western European loans generally do, and these are usually from French or English. But what word in either of them looks anything like gribi?

Turns out, it's just old grippe "flu" in foreign guise. ( What's up with the consonant shift, dudes? )

WARNING: Very rough translation follows.

Günahın Boynuma

Gel günahın boynuma gel (Come to my neck of shame, come)
Dur birazcık bir ara ver (Do stay for a little bit)
Hasretin canımı tüketti (Longing consumed my soul)
Bari bir gün sohbete gel (Come chat for at least one day)

Mumları yaktım bir ümit önce (I burned the candles / A hope at first)
Aynaya baktım sürdüm kokular (I gazed in the mirror / I spread the scents)
Bir çizik attım kara kaplıya vah (I added one line / Woe to the black cover)
Vah yine bana kısmet yeni acılar (Oh, again fate is bitter to me)

Yâr sevdamı sürüyüp gidiyor (Darling is taking my love and going)
Dağlara deryalara (To the mountains, to the seas)
Hem hürriyet hem de aşk istiyor (He wants both freedom and love)
Vay bana vaylar bana (Woe to me, woes to me!)

Yâr gücünü ben de deniyor (Darling barely calls me)
Gül yüzleri yabana (Smile wildly on the faces)
Hem kolay hem de çok zor (Simple and yet very difficult)
Vay bana vaylar bana (Woe to me, woes to me!)

In a list of Turkish dishes, I came across the word kavurma which apparently means "cubed browned lamb". It looked suspiciously close to korma, the name for a saucy North Indian dish, so I naturally wondered if they were related. Yup! The OED traces them both back to an older Turkish qawurma from the verb qawurmak "roast, bake". Furthermore, there seems to be another cognate in the name of the Persian dish ghormeh (Turkic/Arabic /q/ regularly becomes /G/ in Modern Persian), a kind of lamb stew.

I haven't been this excited since I figured out that Armenian basturma and Yiddish pastrame must be distant cousins. (Again, the connexion is Turkish: Ottoman baSdirma, of uncertain origin; the modern form is pastırma.) It's both thrilling and dispiriting to find these cognates. On the one hand, I love uncovering cultural interpentration; on the other, it makes the individual cuisines seem somewhat less special when you realise how much they've borrowed from their neighbours.