After months of being asked to find an easier way to distribute bazaar shirts, and weeks of hard work getting it all ready, the TurklishTees.com store is finally open for business! Now if you want to buy shirts and other items featured on the weekly bazaar, you no longer have to deal with the nightmare of the Turkish postal service or the inconvenience of international money transfers. You can get your Turklish fix direct from the online store and save all the hassle. Easy!

What you see in the store right now is only the beginning— as the weeks go by there will be new designs, weekly specials and limited edition designs, and even contests where you can win free stuff. There’s also the opportunity to have your favourite bazaar shirt made into a custom one-of-a-kind design— just contact me for details.

The store ships worldwide, so everyone should be able to get any item they want easily. As soon as possible I would like to open up additional regional branches, especially for those in Australasia and Europe, just to make shipping even more straightforward— if anyone in those areas is aware of a good local distributor please let me know.

Thanks for your patience while I got the store ready— I wanted it to be everything you asked for and I hope I’ve hit the mark. Happy shopping!

At least once a week I get asked some variation on this question: what’s it like to live in an Arab country? Answer: I don’t know. I’ve never lived in an Arab country. But wait, Turks are Arabs, right?

No, that couldn’t be more wrong. But it seems to be such a common misconception that I thought I’d take a few minutes here to clarify a few points that often leave people confused:

1. Turkey is in the Middle East, and Middle East countries are by definition Arab. I know a lot of Turks who would disagree with the first part, and a lot of Israelis who would disagree with the second part. Not all Middle East countries are Arab, and many Turks think of Turkey as identifying more with Europe and other parts of Asia in terms of political and cultural likeness. I personally think of Turkey as a bridge between Europe and Asia, but there’s a lot of room for debate on that subject.
2. Even if you don’t call it a Middle Eastern country, Turkey is still adjacent to all those Arab countries, and Turks are mostly Muslim, so they must be pretty much the same as Arabs. That’s like saying that Germans must be French because their country is adjacent to France and they’re Christian just like the French. Turks are, ethnically speaking, Ural-Altaic peoples, more closely related to Mongols and Chinese than to Arabs. In fact, historically the line between “Mongolian” and “Turkish” is rather blurred. In Western schoolbooks we tend to identify Genghis Khan and Attila The Hun as Mongols; most Turks see those figures as Turkish or at the very least, Turkic (and though Turkic they certainly are, “Turkish” is a more dynamic term and may or may not apply).
3. Like all Middle Eastern peoples, Turks speak Arabic, so that makes them Arab. This is just flat-out wrong. Although it’s doubtless that some Turks do know how to speak Arabic, the language of the Turkish people is, oddly enough, Turkish. Turkish (wiki) is an Altaic language, which linguistically has more in common with Korean or Japanese than it does with Arabic. Arabic is a Semitic language, more closely related to Hebrew and Aramaic (wiki), and having very little to do with any Altaic language, much less any Turkic one. I think where the confusion lies with this is that most Turks are Muslim, and Arabic is the language of Islam, and many people confuse religion with ethnicity. Also, up until 1928 most Turkish speakers wrote their language using Ottoman script, which to an untrained eye looks indistinguishable from Arabic. But in modern times Turkish is written using the Latin alphabet, albeit with a few modified characters.
4. Turks look like Arabs, so it’s an easy mistake to make. Have a look at the photo above, taken in eastern Turkey by Nuri Bilge Ceylan. Do those men look Arab to you? Of course not. And even within the group, their facial features cover a range from European all the way to East Asian. The truth is, Turks vary in appearance greatly throughout the country— some have fair skin and light hair, others have dark skin and light eyes, and still others have features like those found in Altaic peoples thousands of kilometres east of Turkey. That’s not to say that some Turks don’t resemble some Arabs, but then again I know a few Germans whom one might mistake for French at a glance. It doesn’t mean it’s okay to lump them all together.

As a bit of a side anecdote, by coincidence I stumbled upon a forum a few weeks ago (sorry, I can’t remember the url) where a Korean man was making some very interesting points about ethnicity versus cultural development in Asia. At one point he was giving some narrative background about Turkic languages and Turkic peoples, and then someone else in the conversation used the term “Central Asia,” which set the Korean guy off on a huge discourse about how the whole concept of “Central Asia” was an invention by the Russians to try to solidify the Soviet hold on those areas, and that if it weren’t for the tremendous Soviet pressure on those nations to conform to Russian culture and language, i.e. if they’d all been left to progress “naturally,” then we’d probably now be referring to that entire gigantic region as the United Nations of Turkistan. Someone then asked the guy exactly where he would draw the borders of this theoretical Turkistan, and the Korean man suggested that even Korea and Japan wouldn’t be out of the question. He mentioned that when he and his family had visited eastern Turkey, they often got mistaken for Turkish because their facial structure is so similar to the Turks living in that area.

This got me to thinking about my own observations over the past few months, starting back when I discovered the Azerbaijani television network and was shocked to hear that the spoken language would be nearly indistinguishable from Turkish if it weren’t for those Russian-sounding words they throw in from time to time. And they’re starting to use a Roman script like we do, but when they were Soviet they were forced to use a Cyrillic script, and in addition some of them still use an Arabic-based script as well. But the spoken Azeri language is pretty much like Turkish (I imagine that this is much like the minor differences between spoken Norwegian and spoken Swedish). Same goes for Kazakh, and Turkmen, and Uzbek— Emirhan says he can understand people in all those languages, with some minor vocabulary adjustments.

So that got me thinking about how far east the similarities would carry, and I went to YouTube and started watching some Mongolian programming… unbelievable. I expected it to sound something like my stereotype of Mandarin Chinese, but it doesn’t— rather it sounds a lot like Turkish with some heavy Russian influences (some of the grammatical structures are Indo-European rather than Ural-Altaic, but only some). I was shocked at how much I understood. Also, one of my friends who comes from the western part of China speaks a regional Chinese dialect that she claims is “so close to Turkish, it’s scary.” She said she’s actually had small conversations with Turks and been able to hobble along with basic to moderate understanding.

I don’t know much Korean or Japanese, but Emirhan said Japanese people who speak Turkish almost never have a strong foreign accent. They sound like Turks. And the few Japanese people I’ve met here who learned Turkish have all said that it was an easy language for them to learn, and the pronunciations came naturally. I don’t know any Koreans in Turkey, so I can’t comment on that, but I know what the guy on the forum means when he says that some Koreans and some eastern Turks get mistaken for one another. And it’s possible that you could throw a couple of Mongolians into the picture and still be unsure as to who comes from where. This is one of the reasons why Turks get so annoyed when Westerners assume that “Turkish” and “Arab” are the same thing. Turks have more in common with the East Asians than they do with the Arabs. The only thing Turks ever shared with Arabia was a writing system, and even that’s now long gone, as it never really suited the Turkish language well anyway.

It all gets even more spooky when I think back to a year or so ago when I thought Emirhan was pulling my leg about this supposed theory that Native Americans are Turkic, and then when I did the research to back up my claim that he was talking nonsense, I discovered instead that in several ancient Native American languages, the word for “sky” is the same as the Turkish word, and the words for many of the colours are the same as in Turkish, and so on. Apparently a lot of experts in the field agree that these Americans also orginate from somewhere in the United Nations of Turkistan. And then there are the similarities in some of the faces— again with the high cheekbones and the slightly angled rectangular eyes. Of course I can’t say for sure that that’s where Native Americans came from, but certainly it’s an interesting theory.

So back to my original point, if you were unsure before about whether Turkey was an Arab country, hopefully I’ve cleared that up. But even if you were familiar with Turkish ethnicity before now, perhaps it’s still worth a look at some online resources if you’re curious to learn more about the great mystery of these highly nomadic and charismatic people. I, for one, am always on the lookout for new clues, but I’m not kidding myself— this is a puzzle that will never be completely solved.

Edit, May 2009: I’m closing comments on this post, just because it’s been almost two years, and I think everything that needs to be said has been said. We’re now to the point where people are either starting to repeat what others have said, or are going off-topic. I’ve deleted some of the off-topic comments where it was obvious that certain contributors were using this thread as a place to voice their propaganda, which may have its place elsewhere, but is irrelevant here. The point of this article was to clear up misconceptions about race, not to start a flame war about which race is better than the others. So… yeah, comments closed.

First of all, thanks to everyone who weighed in on the mystery of the Hiragana shoes.

I also contacted JP over at japundit.com about the shoes, and this is what he had to say about them:

I took a look at the text, and it is, indeed bogus hiragana.

I also read it as dzu-me-da as you did, with improper diacritics on the second character.

I also had my wife take a look at it, and she read the first character as “u”. The following shows the difference between “zu” and “u” (I hope your computer can handle Japanese text).

zu =づ

u = う

Based on what my wife said, I guess that someone tried copy the Japanese name Umeda (うめだ) and got the diacritics wrong. As the text is written, I does not really mean anything, but the story behind it is pretty interesting so I will write something about it on Japundit with a link back to your site.

By the way, did these characters come on the shoes when they were purchased?

Thanks for sending this along, and please keep us in mind if you run across anything else that might interest our readers.

Well, funny you should mention— as it turns out, I saw this yesterday at the bazaar:

Again, for various reasons I suspect at least some degree of nonsense (as you would on any $2 t-shirt that says “Dolce & Gabbana fashion company”), but as I mentioned before I’m hardly an expert, so I thought I’d leave it to my Japanese-savvy readers and the kind folks at Japundit to tear it apart. What do you make of this one?

Oh, and yes, the Hiragana shoes came that way from the bazaar… and I’ve just today discovered that my housemate actually has two pair of them, both with the same nonsense message. I guess he really really liked them.

This morning I was reading this article on Sortipreneur, and although the point he was trying to make had to do with something else entirely, the thing that I personally got out of it was that there’s more to Turkish social networking than I realised. In the article I discovered links to both Yonja and Mondus, two Turkish social networks I hadn’t been aware of. I went and signed up for both— if you’re at either of the sites, please feel free to friend me: my Yonja / my Mondus

Incidentally, if anyone is a Mondus expert, I’d be interested to know how to personalise the url for one’s profile page. It was easy enough to change on Yonja, but my Mondus profile has this ridiculous url that no one can ever be expected to find, much less remember, and I can’t work out how to change it into something more reasonable.

Also, please let me know in the comments if you know of other Turkish social networking sites, because I’m thinking this would be a good opportunity for me to practice my written Turkish.

It’s weird, you live with someone for a while and you think you’re familiar with all their stuff… but this morning I found these shoes that apparently belong to one of our housemates. The reason this caught my eye is because (A) I can read a bit of Japanese, or at the very least I know my kana well enough, and (B) we all know the Turkish reputation for printing nonsense in other languages on apparel.

I don’t actually know if these characters in this combination mean anything in Japanese or not, but the reason I’m suspicious is because of that middle character. I’m guessing this was supposed to be printed as “づめだ,” but the second character, me… I’m pretty sure that shouldn’t have the little two-stroke diacritical mark that du (the first character) and da have. I don’t think that modified me character even exists. So I’m thinking this might just be the first example of Turkanese I’ve run across. I wish I knew enough about Japanese to say for sure, but my interest comes more from the direction of a general linguist than that of a Japanese student, and I’m hoping one of you out there who actually reads Japanese can help clear this up. Do these shoes bear some sort of profound message, or is it nonsense?

Actually, now that I think about it, I’ve seen quite a few shirts with Japanese characters at the bazaar… if we can get someone (or a couple of someones) who can analyse them for us, I’ll start taking photos of them and we’ll double our fun.

And speaking of the bazaar, it’ll be back tomorrow in full force, don’t you worry.

I was reading Lily Monk’s blog today, and yesterday she wrote an interesting article about a subject I was just exploring the other day in my guest post in Jake’s blog: the struggles of learning to speak a new language versus the separate but related skills of writing, listening, and reading. Lily is English but is teaching herself to speak Japanese in preparation for a medical internship she’ll be undertaking in Nagasaki later this year. She, like me, is an introvert who usually finds learning to read easier than learning to speak (she has quite accomplished reading skills in both Spanish and Turkish), but with Japanese she’s finding the challenge to be the other way around.

I grew up in an area that was mostly hispanic, and I used to roll my eyes at people who said, “I can understand Spanish, I just can’t speak it.” Sure, I thought. Certainly this is what people say when they’re embarrassed to admit they don’t know anything about Spanish. But now I get it, because I’m in exactly the same position with Turkish. I can read and understand conversations, but struggle to write or speak. However, I wonder how different that would be if Turkish were still written with an Arabic script and if I’d had that hurdle to overcome as well? Would my reading skills have progressed so well?

Coincidentally I, too, have learned some Japanese as a hobby, but unlike Lily I’ve found that my Japanese has progressed in much the same way as my Turkish— I can recognise the meanings of about 1000 kanji, and I know all my kana and some simple grammar, which means I can read some basic stuff on Japanese web sites… but have no clue what any of this stuff sounds like when it’s spoken, or how one would pronounce it in Japanese. I just know that the grid-looking one with the two lines means car, the pointy one means person, and so forth. So Lily’s post has given me some more stuff to think about, not only in terms of how English speakers learn other writing systems, but also about how I can convert what I know about my learning style into an effective tool for learning to speak instead of just reading all the time. Link to Lily Goes To Japan / Link to my interview on A Foreign Perspective

I’ll admit it, I love lolcats, and lolpresidents, and every other variation you could possibly come up with. Sometimes stupid-funny annoys me, but other times it just catches me the right way, especially when there’s an opportunity for the virus/meme to spread in such a way that it allows for either (A) clever captioning with a pop culture reference you either get or you don’t (see photo above, my current favourite lolpresident), (B) creative photoshopping (see also: Worth1000), or both.

But over the past couple of days, I’ve been thinking a lot about how so much of what I experience daily in the English-speaking internet community doesn’t really translate into Turkish. I live with three Turks, two of whom have very limited English and one (Emirhan) who has excellent English language skills, but like the other two has limited knowledge of western pop culture. And the language jokes, even if they don’t involve pop culture references, are still difficult to explain sometimes. For instance, Emirhan almost always understands why the items from the bazaar are funny, but he doesn’t always get the captions I write, especially if a particular caption plays on a tricky grammatical problem that sounds funny to native English speakers but wouldn’t necessarily seem odd to people who speak English as a second language (I have many more thoughts on this issue which I will address in a separate post tomorrow). Sometimes I can explain the joke, but other times it doesn’t translate at all and I’m met with a blank stare.

So I guess what I’m trying to get at is that although the four of us live together and share group jokes of our own, the three of them have Turkish jokes that I don’t get, and there’s certainly a huge part of my social life (namely the meme-infested English-speaking internet community) that they can’t really participate in on any meaningful level. Lolcats, for instance, is one of those things you either understand or you don’t, even if English is your first language, and once you start trying to explain it to someone, you’re already overexplaining and the joke loses a lot. There’s an element of timing that’s necessary when it comes to clever one-liners. I’m curious to know if this sort of thing exists in the Turkish-speaking online community; I know things like blogging and podcasting are just barely getting started here, but the Turkish have a very well-developed sense of humour and it wouldn’t surprise me if they have their own little funny memes community that I’m not even aware of, and that I wouldn’t find funny anyway.

A few days ago I started talking about a potential project to learn Turkish (or rather, stop working on my already good reading skills and move on to improving my speaking) in a concentrated way over a relatively short period of time, and in public for all to see and poke fun at. So far there has been an overwhelmingly positive response to this idea, and chances are I’m going to do it. This might require significant donations of vodka, though, to get me over the initial hurdle.

Jake over at A Foreign Perspective is an American who moved to Turkey at roughly the same time I did, and yet unlike me his spoken Turkish is (apparently) quite good. He lives in Adana, which is a slightly different context from life here in Antalya. Adana, unlike Antalya, is not a particular tourist destination, which could be looked at in a couple of different ways— on one hand, it must be difficult and intimidating in such a very Turkish city to be dropped in at the deep end and have to speak Turkish without a safety net right from the beginning, but on the other hand, I’ve found from living in Antalya that if you do have people around you who speak English, although you might feel more comfortable, you don’t have any incentive to learn Turkish (especially since everyone in a tourist city is keen to develop their English).

So it’s hard to say which situation is more difficult. I have a friend from England here in Antalya who started out living in Adana for three years, and although she said she spent the first six weeks in tears because she couldn’t communicate with anyone, after that her learning gained momentum and she was functionally independent within a few months. She said she doesn’t think it would have ever happened if she’d lived in Antalya from the beginning. Her opinion is that the best thing for me to do is go stay with a large family in a Turkish mountain village for a few months. She swears I’ll come back fluent. Perhaps that’s true, but my guess is we’ll never find out. My personal situation right now is not such that I would just disappear into the mountains for any significant period, unless someone would pay me to do so (any takers? Didn’t think so).

Getting back to Jake, what has caught my interest most recently in his blog is a continuing series of posts detailing his experiences of learning Turkish and describing the methods he has used to get where he is. I found the articles interesting and helpful, and I think most of it applies across the board, regardless of which language you’re trying to learn. I’m hoping to take a lot of his suggestions and use them in my own situation.

Or maybe I’ll take my English friend’s suggestion and head for the mountains. Link

As an English-speaking foreigner in a touristy area of Turkey, I am all too familiar with the struggle of trying to learn Turkish while everyone around you is trying to learn English. I’ve been here three years now and can barely string a sentence together. Istanbul-based Carpetblogger writes an hilarious account of her own experiences, including an anecdote that made me laugh out loud:

The pilot of Turkish Airlines plane full of Azeris announces he is preparing to land the plane. The passengers panic. Why? Because the verb in Azeri for “to land” is the same as “to crash.”

According to the article, Carpetblogger was due to take a one-month intensive course in Turkish back in February— I wonder how that turned out… Link.

Incidentally, if anyone thinks they can teach me Turkish in a month, I invite you to come and try. Having said that, learning Turkish is not my problem; I can read like an olympic champ and my grammar skills are awesome. My problem is getting over my debilitating fear of speaking. Ironic, as I’m a professional singer.

I’m deeply into languages and linguistics in general as a hobby— I go through phases where I really push forward with my Turkish language studies, and for a few days now I’ve felt one of those phases coming on. Perhaps I should document my progress here? It would hold me accountable, and you guys would probably get a laugh out of my mistakes. Think of it as the other side of the Turklish coin. Turnabout is fair play and all that. Should I do it? Of course I’d do it right, with audio clips and everything… maybe even a podcast or two. What’s the point of having different languages if you can’t laugh at people who talk funny?

Osman from lingulangu.org found me on a Turkish language-learning web site, and asked if I would take his survey to help him with his research regarding computer-assisted Turkish learning. The survey took me less than five minutes to complete, and was completely anonymous. I know that many of my readers are also students of the Turkish language, so if you’re learning Turkish and have an extra few minutes, pop on over and help Osman out. Link