Your speculative rendering of Sakha through the metaphysics of Spinoza - "it dogs, barkingly and me-wardly" - reminded me of Borges on the language if Tlön, whose philosophical presiding spirit was not Spinoza, but Berkeley: " 'The moon rose above the river.' is 'hlör u fang axaxaxas mlö', or literally 'upward behind the onstreaming it mooned.'"
As you recover from your unfortunate tangle with the Bucharest train system, you can at least console yourself that you're following in a tradition that goes all the way back to Thales, as related by Plato in the Theaetetus:
"Why, take the case of Thales, Theodorus. While he was studying the stars and looking upwards, he fell into a pit, and a neat, witty Thracian servant girl jeered at him, they say, because he was so eager to know the things in the sky that he could not see what was there before him at his very feet. The same jest applies to all who pass their lives in philosophy."
I hope there were no Thracian servant girls to jeer at your misfortune.
It's so strange to hear our (Turkish) distant cousins in Sakha also add i's in front of some borrowed words like we do. Even though it's not formal usage, one can hear this in villages or in old books. Mostly it's words that start with two consecutive vowels which is against the rules (steam-istim, Sparta-Isparta) but also for example lemon-ilimon. Thousands of years and miles later, we're still doing same stuff.
Sakha vocabulary and much of the grammar have drifted very far from Turkish, but the phonology remains largely similar. Not just the dread of starting a word with a consonant cluster, which as you note sometimes compels the addition of a vowel to borrowed foreign terms, but also the rules of vowel harmony in general. No word can contain front vowels and back vowels together, just like in Turkish. Thanks for your comment, iyi günler!
I checked wikipedia for a bit about Sakha, and they even use kini for 3rd person singular just like yoruks (and their descendants Turkish Cypriots) use k(g)enn(d)i. Amazing!
Interesting, I didn't know that about the Yörüks. If you're interested in the connections between Sakha and Turkish, I would strongly recommend Geoffrey Lewis's The Turkish Language Reform: A Catastrophic Success. He describes Atatürk's well-known efforts to find “pure” Turkic words to replace the Arabic and Persian ones that had entered under the Ottomans, and notes that in some cases the only place these could still be found was in Northeastern Siberia! (I don't recall the specific examples he discusses -- I had thought “ulus” was one of them, but I just looked it up and I see that it was already in use in Ottoman Turkish and that it comes originally from Mongolian.) https://ia903001.us.archive.org/0/items/GeoffreyLewisTheTurkishLanguageReformACatastrophicSuccess/Geoffrey%20Lewis%20The%20Turkish%20Language%20Reform%20A%20Catastrophic%20Success_text.pdf
Wow thanks this is a great book which I didn't know about.
The Yörüks being nomadic people spending time in mountains and among themselves, have been speaking an older version of Turkish than the people who settle in villages or towns. When the Ottoman Empire needed to settle Cyprus, they force-settled some of those nomads there, which created the strangely beautiful Cypriot Turkish with that ancient Turkish melting with some Greek, English and Italian.
My father's ancestors were also a similar band of nomads who were force settled during the American Civil War when the price of cotton skyrocketed and subtropical swamps of Çukurova happened to be a suitable place to grow that crop.
There's a strange parallel of being a reservoir between the Yörüks as a go-to source of untouched people to force-settle somewhere and Northeastern Siberia languages as a go-to source of untouched words to force-settle somewhere.
Were the settled Yörüks still known as Yörüks in the mid-20th century?
My family claims my grandmother's family were Yörük, but she grew up in a village. This has long been a mystery to me.
(In line with your accident, Justin: my dad visited the village once, as a child, and on learning this I pressed him for every ethnographic detail I could. After extensive questioning he finally admitted that he didn't know anything, he spent the whole time reading. Anlıyorum, Baba, aynısını yapardım.)
I'm by no means an expert on this, but since they're still known as Yoruks in their settled villages today (for example when talking about a family, somebody would comment "they're Yoruk"), it wouldn't surprise me if they were known as Yoruks in mid-20th century. Where's that village?
There's an interesting review of Kim's book at https://bmcr.brynmawr.edu/2018/2018.09.58/. Other books brought to mind by your essay are Abu-Lughod's "Before European Hegemony" and of course Benveniste's book on Indo-European languages which I read a big part of more than 40 years ago.
You discreetly hid your legs behind the tail end of this post, Justin, and slow reader that I am--especially when the intricate complexities of Russian and Sakha are involved--I've only just got to them now. Yikes. I hope you're on the mend. I'm a short walk from the Buttes, should you need anything dropped off or picked up. Түргэнник үтүөрүҥ!
Эйиэхэ махтанабын, my friend! That's very kind and thoughtful of you. My leg is healing surprisingly fast, and I've managed to figure out how to take care of basic necessities under conditions of temporary disability. But let us indeed find an occasion to hang out soon!
Interesting, as always. But the Italian "biancheggiare" is much the same as the Russian белеть. ("...e sotto il maestrale / urla e biancheggia il mar...", Giosuè Carducci, San Martino), not to be confused with "sbiancare", "to whiten".
Thanks, Maria. You are indeed right. There goes my admittedly under-researched theory! My friend Stephen Menn also pointed out to me something obvious, and that I really should have recalled: the Latin verb “albeo” can also often mean “to *be* white” rather than “to turn white”. This is the word that is sometimes used in fact in that well-known stock example from medieval logic, “Socrates is white” = “Socrates albet”. There's also “rubeo” (in contrast with “rubesco”, which always means “to *turn* red”), and perhaps some others. Oh well, that's why I call these Substack posts “essays”.
Thank you. I always admire the way you "navigate complexities". And please, take care of your foot! One Cheburashka Чебурашка is enough. Warm regards from B.A.
Your speculative rendering of Sakha through the metaphysics of Spinoza - "it dogs, barkingly and me-wardly" - reminded me of Borges on the language if Tlön, whose philosophical presiding spirit was not Spinoza, but Berkeley: " 'The moon rose above the river.' is 'hlör u fang axaxaxas mlö', or literally 'upward behind the onstreaming it mooned.'"
As you recover from your unfortunate tangle with the Bucharest train system, you can at least console yourself that you're following in a tradition that goes all the way back to Thales, as related by Plato in the Theaetetus:
"Why, take the case of Thales, Theodorus. While he was studying the stars and looking upwards, he fell into a pit, and a neat, witty Thracian servant girl jeered at him, they say, because he was so eager to know the things in the sky that he could not see what was there before him at his very feet. The same jest applies to all who pass their lives in philosophy."
I hope there were no Thracian servant girls to jeer at your misfortune.
A worthy successor to the late Guy Davenport. Good work.
It's so strange to hear our (Turkish) distant cousins in Sakha also add i's in front of some borrowed words like we do. Even though it's not formal usage, one can hear this in villages or in old books. Mostly it's words that start with two consecutive vowels which is against the rules (steam-istim, Sparta-Isparta) but also for example lemon-ilimon. Thousands of years and miles later, we're still doing same stuff.
Sakha vocabulary and much of the grammar have drifted very far from Turkish, but the phonology remains largely similar. Not just the dread of starting a word with a consonant cluster, which as you note sometimes compels the addition of a vowel to borrowed foreign terms, but also the rules of vowel harmony in general. No word can contain front vowels and back vowels together, just like in Turkish. Thanks for your comment, iyi günler!
I checked wikipedia for a bit about Sakha, and they even use kini for 3rd person singular just like yoruks (and their descendants Turkish Cypriots) use k(g)enn(d)i. Amazing!
Interesting, I didn't know that about the Yörüks. If you're interested in the connections between Sakha and Turkish, I would strongly recommend Geoffrey Lewis's The Turkish Language Reform: A Catastrophic Success. He describes Atatürk's well-known efforts to find “pure” Turkic words to replace the Arabic and Persian ones that had entered under the Ottomans, and notes that in some cases the only place these could still be found was in Northeastern Siberia! (I don't recall the specific examples he discusses -- I had thought “ulus” was one of them, but I just looked it up and I see that it was already in use in Ottoman Turkish and that it comes originally from Mongolian.) https://ia903001.us.archive.org/0/items/GeoffreyLewisTheTurkishLanguageReformACatastrophicSuccess/Geoffrey%20Lewis%20The%20Turkish%20Language%20Reform%20A%20Catastrophic%20Success_text.pdf
Wow thanks this is a great book which I didn't know about.
The Yörüks being nomadic people spending time in mountains and among themselves, have been speaking an older version of Turkish than the people who settle in villages or towns. When the Ottoman Empire needed to settle Cyprus, they force-settled some of those nomads there, which created the strangely beautiful Cypriot Turkish with that ancient Turkish melting with some Greek, English and Italian.
My father's ancestors were also a similar band of nomads who were force settled during the American Civil War when the price of cotton skyrocketed and subtropical swamps of Çukurova happened to be a suitable place to grow that crop.
There's a strange parallel of being a reservoir between the Yörüks as a go-to source of untouched people to force-settle somewhere and Northeastern Siberia languages as a go-to source of untouched words to force-settle somewhere.
Amazing!
Amazing indeed! Thanks for the conversation and the book suggestion, already on my kindle! Have a great day!
Were the settled Yörüks still known as Yörüks in the mid-20th century?
My family claims my grandmother's family were Yörük, but she grew up in a village. This has long been a mystery to me.
(In line with your accident, Justin: my dad visited the village once, as a child, and on learning this I pressed him for every ethnographic detail I could. After extensive questioning he finally admitted that he didn't know anything, he spent the whole time reading. Anlıyorum, Baba, aynısını yapardım.)
I'm by no means an expert on this, but since they're still known as Yoruks in their settled villages today (for example when talking about a family, somebody would comment "they're Yoruk"), it wouldn't surprise me if they were known as Yoruks in mid-20th century. Where's that village?
There's an interesting review of Kim's book at https://bmcr.brynmawr.edu/2018/2018.09.58/. Other books brought to mind by your essay are Abu-Lughod's "Before European Hegemony" and of course Benveniste's book on Indo-European languages which I read a big part of more than 40 years ago.
Thanks!
You discreetly hid your legs behind the tail end of this post, Justin, and slow reader that I am--especially when the intricate complexities of Russian and Sakha are involved--I've only just got to them now. Yikes. I hope you're on the mend. I'm a short walk from the Buttes, should you need anything dropped off or picked up. Түргэнник үтүөрүҥ!
Эйиэхэ махтанабын, my friend! That's very kind and thoughtful of you. My leg is healing surprisingly fast, and I've managed to figure out how to take care of basic necessities under conditions of temporary disability. But let us indeed find an occasion to hang out soon!
Interesting, as always. But the Italian "biancheggiare" is much the same as the Russian белеть. ("...e sotto il maestrale / urla e biancheggia il mar...", Giosuè Carducci, San Martino), not to be confused with "sbiancare", "to whiten".
Thanks, Maria. You are indeed right. There goes my admittedly under-researched theory! My friend Stephen Menn also pointed out to me something obvious, and that I really should have recalled: the Latin verb “albeo” can also often mean “to *be* white” rather than “to turn white”. This is the word that is sometimes used in fact in that well-known stock example from medieval logic, “Socrates is white” = “Socrates albet”. There's also “rubeo” (in contrast with “rubesco”, which always means “to *turn* red”), and perhaps some others. Oh well, that's why I call these Substack posts “essays”.
Thank you. I always admire the way you "navigate complexities". And please, take care of your foot! One Cheburashka Чебурашка is enough. Warm regards from B.A.
white lets and sails sea
a flap
a challenge undenied