En route to Istanbul - Critical Languages Scholarship

Welcome everybody to the newest rebirth of Buxoro Wonderland: as the blog and point-of-contact between myself and the motherland while I am in Istanbul for the next two months!

I'm going to Turkey on a US government-sponsored intensive language learning scholarship. (Important: Any views expressed in this blog are my own and do not represent the views of the United States Department or States or any other organization I am affiliated with.) The program's details and application can be found here for any student out there aspiring to learn any of the less commonly taught and critical need languages it supports: Arabic, Azerbaijani, Bengali, Chinese, Hindi, Korean, Persian, Punjabi, Russian, Turkish and Urdu.

Yildiz Technical University will be hosting my intermediate Turkish class, and I will be staying in the Ortaköy neighborhood of Beşiktaş district (of famous football/soccer fame) of Istanbul. This is located on the European side of Istanbul, right near the water's edge of the Bosphorus River.

So, what will Turkey be like? I don't know! Probably not how it's portrayed in the Tiny Toons cartoon featuring the famous 'Istanbul' song by They Might Be Giants which, if anything, is far more evocative of Arabian peninsula-type imagery than anything identifiably Turkish.

Of course, the conflation of Turks with Arabs seems pretty common in Western media stuffs, especially in this Youtube gem: a 1984 advertisement for 'Fry's Turkish Delight', full of 'Eastern promise'. The comments are particularly telling - "thats arabic not turkish" per canberkuysal, "OMG! WE'RE NOT ARAB!!!" per ewalesier, and "there is no desert in turkey we're not arab!" per togan86... etc. I definitely hope to learn more about Turkish cultural identity!

Check back for more posts soon - unlike previous attempts, this blog will be updated regularly on location for the regularly updated. Thanks!

+ Firuze (my 'Turkish' name from my intensive beginning course at Georgetown University... derived from the Persian word for turquoise. Let's see if I use it in Turkey!)

Assolomu alaikum - Agglutination

Uzbek word structure, like in the other Turkic language, is agglutinative - which means that there are a lot of bound morphemes (affixes) bundled together synthetically into one word. For example, the Uzbek word 'ilojsizliklari' "their impossibility" is made up of :
iloj - possibility
siz - without, 'less'
lik - abstract morpheme 'ness'
lari - third person plural possessive affix

The Turkic languages have a crazy rich morphemic system compared to English's starved one. An easy way to think about it is to imagine that most words in Uzbek/Turkish/Karakalpak/etc are like the English 'antidisestablishmentarianism', super long but made up of distinguishable smaller parts which contribute to the meaning of the whole word.

Tense, mood, aspect, etc are all put together in the verb in this way. The verb boshlanmoq 'to start' becomes

boshlandim "I started"
boshlangan emish "Supposedly he started"
boshlanayapsiz "You are starting right now"
boshlanaman "I will start"
boshlanmoqchimiz "We want to start"

Just a taste of the wonders of Uzbek agglutination!