Re:Funny words in English and Turkish
Hey everybody,
Having invited everyone to come look at this conversation begun by Javier Bustamante and friends, I decided I’d better translate my message in Spanish dated Feb 17, just in case anyone wanted to read it who didn’t speak Spanish: So here goes:
The few paragraphs aren’t important, just a request for native-speaker feedback on my Spanish, and a summary of Javier’s message, in case mine was read by anyone not familiar with his. I’ll translate beginning with paragraph 4:
I know very well about such things. When I lived in Turkey, we ahd to be very careful about certain things. When going shopping, we couldn’t use the word, “peach” because it was a very rude word in the Turkish. I never found out exactly what it meant, but I’ve always assumed it was like the Spanish word, “Puto,” which I’d translate into English roughly as “bastard”.
It’s fortunate that AM radio stations aren’t so popular any more, because we love to wear T-Shirts printed with our favorite radio stations. The problem is that “am” in Turkish, means the same thing as “manco” in Japanese (a reference to Javier’s message). It’s not a word most of us would want to wear emblazoned across our chest, especially in a very conservative culture like Turkey.
I was in Turkey on an assignment with the Air Force. At that time, I had a friend that spoke very good Turkish, being married to a Turkish woman. One day, we were waiting in line at the chow hall for dinner. There was a Kurdish employee at the front entrance, whose job it was to check our I.D. to make sure that only people who were supposed to be eating there would be served. Near his station, there was one of those black signs behind glass with those plastic letters they would use to tell us what was being served for each meal. My friend waited until the supervisor was looking the other way, and rearranged the letters on the board to say, “amkebap”, which, you’ll realize would mean something in Turkish that some of us might find pretty disgusting. So I won’t get graphic about it.
But I’ll never forget the expression on the supervisor’s face when he noticed what had been done. I still don’t know how it is possible for a man from the Middle East to turn that particular shade of red.
Mark Springer
Sacramento, CA USA
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Language pair: English; Turkish
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Mark S.
February 20, 2005
# Msgs: 3
Latest: February 20, 2005
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