The Grants' Bulgaria Blog.

Elly here

We’re just over a week away from it being 3 months since we left dear old Tassie. That’s a quarter of the year gone!

Already we have seen vast improvements with Aydin’s schoolwork; he no longer mixes up the numbers between 11-20 when counting and can now count up to 49 without assistance! His handwriting is getting better too. It’s all really reassuring that we have been achieving what we came here for.

Last week David asked us if we might feel ready for proper Turkish language learning. The three of us decided that we were finally settled enough and ‘living in Bulgaria’ enough (ie. not relying on so much contact with Australia as we have been previously) that we can properly embrace learning Turkish. So Kathryn and David sat down and had a think about who might be the most appropriate language helper. This helper needs to know how to read Turkish in the Latin script, since most Bulgarian Turks use the Cyrillic script. The person they initially came up with was unable to help due to recently getting a job, but she suggested someone else, who we went along and met on Monday afternoon.

Her name is Mirem and she was honoured and delighted to be asked! She lives in the middle of the Mahalle with her husband Şevket (Shevket) and two children, Hasan (boy, 7, very cheeky) and Sevgü (girl, 4, very cute). She is also a believer – she wouldn’t've been recommended if she hadn’t been! She told us that on Sunday she had prayed to God to be able to do something for him, and on Monday we turned up looking for language help!

We didn’t officially start the lessons until Tuesday and were pleasantly surprised to find that she had already planned out the lesson. She admitted to having been so excited the night before that she was up until 2am with her mind buzzing about it! David had cautioned us from the start that our language helper’s role would be to straighten out our own attempts at learning the language and to point us in the right direction; most of the actual work would have to be done by us. So we had dutifully sat down and worked out a list of things we’d like to be able to say. To have Mirem decide for herself what she felt we should start off with was great!

The lesson started with her going through the Cyrillic alphabet to check that we had worked it out well enough and to also point out how the Turks use it differently to the Bulgarians. Then she produced a pile of booklets which looked like they were designed to help illiterate Millet learn to read Cyrillic Turkish. We worked through three of them – they were quite basic, a picture per page with the corresponding word underneath. We left that day with a list of 42 words to learn, along with a few basic ‘selam’ (greetings):

Merhaba, nasılsın? (Hello, how are you?)

Çok iyiyim, sen nasılsın? (I’m good, how are you?)

Bende çok iyiyim! (I’m good too!)

Also, how to say ‘I/You/(He/She/It)/We/You all/They all did it* in order to learn how the suffix changes with each pronoun. We’ll get onto suffixes later.

[*There is no gender in Turkish so the same pronoun is used for he/she/it.]

Today we came home with yet another pile of words, in the lesson we quickly did away with the books and turned to learning the parts of the body. I found it interesting how they sometimes simplify things, eg. ayak can be used for both foot and leg (probably just in general and not, say, in a medical emergency!). Stu was also taught to say ‘Elly, your hair is beautiful.’ I was taught to say ‘Stu, will you please remove your beard?’ (Don’t worry devoted fans of Stu’s beard, he said no)

My last point about the Turkish language is that it is (as Wikipedia puts it) an ‘agglutinative language,’ which is just a fancy way of saying that it uses a lot of suffixes (ok, I might’ve paraphrased rather heavily there).

Here is Stu’s favourite example of this:
Arabalarımızdakilerden means ‘From those who are in our cars’
So:
Araba = car
Arabalar = cars
Arabalarımız = our cars
Arabalarımızda = in our cars
Arabalarımızdaki = he who is in our cars
Arabalarımızdakiler = those who are in our cars
Arabalarımızdakilerden = from those who are in our cars!
(lit. ‘car-[plural]-our-in-who-[plural]-from)

Anyway, it’s now waaaaaaay past my bedtime and we are already in the bad habit of going ‘Ugh. Study. Dexter? Yeah!’ and watching tv instead of learning how to read Psalm 51, verses 2-3, 5-6 and 13 in Turkish.

Perhaps tomorrow…

Oh, and by the way, the title of today’s post was the winner of ‘Most common phrase uttered by Elly and Stu’ as voted by, well, us. Kathryn sure finds our constant mixing up and mashing of Bulgarian and Turkish entertaining, I think any Millet we’ve encountered understands our confusion… (by the way, da and evet are yes in Bulgarian and Turkish respectively, to save you from asking).

Lots of love, take care, God bless.

Elly.

Tags: language - Turkish, prayer points

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 27th, 2009 at 10:48 am and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.