The Explore Turkish site has a nice summary of apostrophes (kesme işareti) in Turkish.
I was already familiar with how it's used in proper nouns, especially as it pertains to locations. For example, from Boston would translate to Boston'den while at Boston would translate to Boston'da.
That same page has an example that underscores the importance of precision in your writing. Karın means stomach while kar'ın means "of snow" and karı'n means "your wife". Same letters with totally different meanings depending on where you use or don't use an apostrophe. Interesting!
Sunday, January 27, 2008
Saturday, January 12, 2008
Explore Turkish
This site was brought to my attention in a comment on my December 4 entry. Thank you, whoever you are!
I like what I see so far: good information and enthusiasm. That bought it a spot on my "My Links" list.
It's a good day when resources are brought to me as opposed to me having to go out a look for them. Nice! Hoş!
I like what I see so far: good information and enthusiasm. That bought it a spot on my "My Links" list.
It's a good day when resources are brought to me as opposed to me having to go out a look for them. Nice! Hoş!
Wednesday, January 9, 2008
Mutlu Yıllar!
Yes, friends, with the new year, I want to try different things. As of today, I'm trying out this particular template because it's light, spread out nicely across the entire page (as opposed to being bunched up in the center), and things like my pic of Atatürk have been moved over to the left.
Hoşçakal.
Hoşçakal.
Tuesday, January 8, 2008
Saat iki
Rosetta Stone continues to drill me on time. As a part of reinforcing that, I decided to see how many hits I'd get by punching "saat iki" (2 o'clock) into a Google search. Among the 1.2 million hits (!!), I found this—http://www.hikayeler.net/yazilar/saat-iki/.
Among other things, this site includes a poem called, yep, Saat İki. Seeing it gave me the thought of trying to parse through it as opposed to parsing through a Turkish news article. Would it be easier or harder? I don't know. I do know, however, that it's less important what I try to parse than the parsing effort itself, within reason.
The poem's a bit long so I don't know if I can parse it all in one sitting (i.e., post). But here goes.
"Takvimlere yine yenik düştü günler"
Takvim means calendar. -lere? I don't recognize the suffix. The closest thing to it I recall is -leri and -ları, which means their. "Their calendar" then? Maybe. Maybe not. Moving on for now. Let's see if the context answers the question.
Yine means "1. again, once again, once more. 2. still, nevertheless, even so".
Yenik means partially eaten, eroded, defeated. Hm, doesn't look like this will be a perky poem.
Düştü has me stumped. It's not listed in the online dictionary. Düş means dream but that doesn't seem to fit here. As I browsed the dictionary, I noticed that words starting with düş seem related to falling (düşmek).
Günler means days. No mystery there!
So, that first line seems to say something like "It's that time of year again, eroding, fallen days..." Autumn?
We'll see. I've got to sign off for now.
Among other things, this site includes a poem called, yep, Saat İki. Seeing it gave me the thought of trying to parse through it as opposed to parsing through a Turkish news article. Would it be easier or harder? I don't know. I do know, however, that it's less important what I try to parse than the parsing effort itself, within reason.
The poem's a bit long so I don't know if I can parse it all in one sitting (i.e., post). But here goes.
"Takvimlere yine yenik düştü günler"
Takvim means calendar. -lere? I don't recognize the suffix. The closest thing to it I recall is -leri and -ları, which means their. "Their calendar" then? Maybe. Maybe not. Moving on for now. Let's see if the context answers the question.
Yine means "1. again, once again, once more. 2. still, nevertheless, even so".
Yenik means partially eaten, eroded, defeated. Hm, doesn't look like this will be a perky poem.
Düştü has me stumped. It's not listed in the online dictionary. Düş means dream but that doesn't seem to fit here. As I browsed the dictionary, I noticed that words starting with düş seem related to falling (düşmek).
Günler means days. No mystery there!
So, that first line seems to say something like "It's that time of year again, eroding, fallen days..." Autumn?
We'll see. I've got to sign off for now.
Monday, January 7, 2008
iki adam ata biniyor
Man, I do admire Rosetta Stone (RS). However, I wish they had an answer key for some of these tougher phrases.
"Iki adam ata biniyor" is one of them. RS just shows me a picture of two men atop horses, riding them slowly across a field (nice idyllic image, though the image presented here is from a great John Ford movie named The Searchers). Parsing this was a little confusing:
- iki means 2, of course
- adam means man/men
- ata, on the other hand, can mean father or ancestor or be short for Atatürk. After a while, it dawned on me that perhaps this is one of those cases where a vowel was tacked onto at (horse). Doh! Lo and behold that's the case here. If this is an instance of the vowel harmony rule, its application escapes me in this case. What does the -a mean here?
- biniyor's root apparently is binmek: to know how to mount a horse or to know how to ride one.
Hold up—I just found "ata binmek" at my favorite web-based Turkish dictionary declaring the definition of "ride a horse" as "ata binmek". Oddly enough, if I look up "ata binmek" there, it says it means only "ride".
In any event, close enough for me! So, the -a tagged onto "at" is, apparently, not a vowel harmony application but just some kind of exception. Noted. :^)
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