I said what now?

I resigned myself early on to appearing idiotic while trying to speak Turkish.  I'm just now trying to come to terms with the dangers of being unintentionally profane.

The idiotic appeared almost immediately and returns on a daily (if not hourly) basis.  It's not too hard to accept, really.  This is not an easy language.  Not because it is particularly complex or illogical.  But more so because, to an english speaker, the words are just too damn much alike.  Yazmak is to write.  Yüzmek is to swim.  Yapmak is to do.  Yakmak is to light.  Now that you have that straight, would you like to conjugate those verbs?   Sooner rather than later, you will make an idiotic statment like this:

"Ben mektup arkadaşa yüzüyorum."
"You're doing what?"  Erendiz the Turkish teacher asks me.
"Um, mektup arkadaşa yüzüyorum?"
"You are swimming a letter to your friend?" he asks me sarcastically.  "This will take quite a bit of time, don't you think?"
    
Mm, yeah.  I'm swimming a letter to my friend.

Looking idiotic in Turkish class, however, is not a big deal.  "That's why you get paid the big money," I tell Erendiz.  "To listen to complete idiots like us mangle the Turkish language for four hours a day."   Like Erendiz, the restaurant people in Istanbul can be equally forgiving.  They are certainly no less amused.

"Çöp şiş, istiyorum,"  I confidently order from the waitress at the little restaurant around the corner. 
"Bu?"  she smiles and asks me.
"Çöp şiş?" I say again, repeating (or so I think) what I see written on the laminated menu next to a small photograph of what looks to be some kind of shish kabob.
"Çop şiş?" She asks again.
"Evet," I insist. "Çöp şiş."

What's wrong with these people?  It's written right there on the menu!  How can I possibly screw that up?

I figure it out on the way home, noticing the familiar word on a sign posted next to a vacant lot:  "Buraya çöp koymak yasaktır." (Putting garbage here is prohibited)

Çöp.  Çöp?

Ah, yes.  I see now. "Cop" (with a "C" instead of a "Ç" and an "o" instead an ö and pronouced Jawp) is a stick, or a baton, e.g., something a shish kabob would be cooked on, which is why this word appears on the menu.  "Çöp," on the other hand (that's with a "Ç" instead of a "C" and an "o" instead of an "ö" and pronounced Cheup), is the Turkish word for garbage.  That's right, my friends.  I was confidently proclaiming to my neighborhood waitress that for dinner, I would like her to please bring me their house specialty: the Garbage Kabob. 


Hey Ahmet, guess what the foreign guy out front wants you to cook for him?


I'm not denying it; mistakes were made.  I'm sure they continue to be made, with hilarious regularity.  None of this unexpected.  But I learned there are some words you have to be more careful with than others.

In Week One of my "Turkish for Foreigners" class, Erendiz introduces us to the words of frequency:  sometimes: bazen. never: hiç.  often: sık sık. 

Carla the Spaniard tries one of them out. "Sabahleyin sik sik kahve içiyorum," she says, trying to tell the class she often has coffee in the morning.  Erendiz winces and shakes his head. 

"No, don't ... don't say sik sik.  It's sık sık (suhk suhk)!  Not sik sik (sick sick)."
"Why?" Carla asks innocently. "What's sik sik?"
Erendiz won't tell us, but we find out later from a classmate's Turkish wife that while sık sık means "often," the nearly identical "sik sik" is the Turkish word for a particular male appendage, once repeated.

So, you know.  Don't say sik sik.  Unless you're into that kind of thing.  And whoever you are talking to is particularly hard of hearing.

Erendiz later tells us also about the dangerous proximity of the word bellowed by the junkmen in the street, hurdı! or scrap, and herif, which is the Turkish word for the English invective rhyming with "trucker."  Yes, that one (as "That mother herif just cut me off!")  Now I'm not sure if the junkmen hollering in the street are really looking for scrap, or just having a particularly bad morning.

Then there is the curious case of hayır vs. hıyar.  Hayır (prounced high - ur), is Turkish for "no," one of the most commonly spoken words in the entire language.  Hıyar (pronounced huh-yar) is ... look, there is no polite way to put this.  Hıyar is literally the Turkish word for "dickhead."  More or less our equivalent of calling someone an asshole.

It is also a cucumber.  And hayır, I'm not making that up.

Which I am reasonably sure had led to the following type of exchanges between me and Turkish waiters from the moment I arrived here.


Waiter:  (in Turkish) "Would you like anything else?"
Me:  "Dickhead, thank you, but I'm full."
Waiter: "No desert, anything?"
Me:  "Dickhead, really, there is dickhead possible way I could eat anything else.  Dickhead, just the check."

And so on. 

Clearly, my linguistic idiocy will continue.  At this point I'm just looking to limit the times I am in danger of being  punched in the face.