What is this pickled cabbage!?

Turkish is a beautiful language! Once you understand the complexities as well as the subtleties, the magic of the language begins to reveal itself. Trust me, I know! Before I started learning Turkish I almost could not stand the sound of it- mostly due to hidden prejudices I accidentally had acquired as an exchange student in Germany and Austria. After the first week of Turkish lessons and the unveiling of the mysterious language started to happen, I could see –and hear- the elaborate beauty.

It is my firm belief that language is key to understanding culture –and that is really my purpose for being in Turkey right now, in a nutshell! So understanding Turkish is one thing, understanding its uses are quite a different thing ~the difference in semantics and pragmatics if you want to get all linguistic-y on the matter.

That’s what brings me to the title of this post, “What is this pickled cabbage?” It actually has a sentence preceding it that translates: “What is this diet, what is this pickled cabbage?” (used to point out inconsistencies in one’s behavior). This is a literal translation of an Atasözü or a Turkish proverb. In our orientation in Ankara we were given a list of some 80 Turkish proverbs. We did an exercise that involved looking at the proverbs and finding patterns- we noticed that Turks use food in a lot of their metaphors – my personal favorite food metaphor: “Keskin sirke küpüne zarar verir” *Sharp vinegar only damages its container. It is used to “calm down a moderate person” and I cannot wait until I can use this naturally in context!

The proverbs are great and the literal translations are hilarious, but there is one that really defines our mission here as Fulbright ETAs –and what makes me happy when I think about it: “Çok yaşan değil, çok gezen bilir.” which means: “It isn’t the one who has lived the most but the one who has traveled the most who knows.” Respect to the elders, but I couldn’t agree more.