Language and dance

A Hungarian lady on turkishclass.com wrote this: “Even my name, Ákos, has Turkish origin. Somewhere I’ve read it means ‘white bird’ in old Turkish, as ak-kush.”

 Here’s another great item mentioned on the Web site. This story is told by the composer A. Adnan Saygun in his article “Bartók in Turkey” (The Musical Quarterly, Jan. 1951, pp. 5-9):

“Bartók had set to work for some time studying the Turkish language. The words common to the two languages repeatedly became the subject of our conversation. Having encountered considerable difficulties in convincing not only the women to sing but also the men, whether young or old (for they had a vague apprehension before a stranger who did not speak their language), I proposed to the Master that we make up a sentence that would be almost the same in Hungarian and Turkish. Then whenever we again met some people who were intimidated by the presence of a stranger, I would take over and give them a little talk about the history of the two peoples in which I would say that the Hungarians were only Turks who had settled somewhere else, that they always had spoken Turkish, but that evidently in the course of the centuries their accent had become more or less different. After that I would ask the composer to repeat the sentence we concocted. Bartók would repeat it readily with an anxious smile barely visible on his lips. Of course, everyone understood it, and after several disquisitions on this subject we quietly set to work. Here is the sentence:

In Hungarian: Pamuk tarlón sok árpa, alma, teve, sátor, balta, csizma, kicsi kecske van.

In Turkish: Pamuk tarlasinda çok arpa, alma, deve, çadir, balta, çizme, küçük keçi var.

(Translation: In the cotton field are much barley and many apples, camels, tents, axes, boots, and young goats.)”

Another comment on Turkish Class by a Hungarian reads: “I have to tell you that the Hungarian word for gate is ‘kapu,’ what we got from the Turkish language from ‘kapisi.’”

More interesting comments from Turkish Class:

An Estonian wrote that grammar for the use of verbs and personal pronouns is similar in that in Turkish you do not need to write the personal pronouns before the verb to indicate who did the action. For example: You don’t have to say: sen okuyorsun; you can just say okuyorsun and in Estonian: loed, not sina loed. By the way, the word you (singular) in turkish is “sen” and in Estonian “sina.”

Quoting eestlane, a user from www.turkishclass.com, said: “The first thing I noticed when studying Turkish was that the ending of infinitive forms of verbs (-mak) is similar with Estonian because in Estonian the equivalent for -mak is -ma. The second thing was that the verb ‘olmak’ -- in Estonian is ‘olma’ (actually ‘olEma’ but this is not so important). The Turkish verb, olmak was actually bolmak in old Turkish; whereas, in Hungarian uses vol- for bol- similarly.”

One of the things I love about watching folk dance when I visit another country is that in its primitive, tribal or ethnic way it expresses ancient ceremony and tradition. Nearly every country has its own folk dance as a part of its heritage.

Dear Charlotte: In your piece on similarities between Hungarian and Turkish culture you mentioned folk music. Here is some interesting information I thought you’d like to see. I got this off the Turkish Class Web site. According to A. Andan Saygun and Laszlo Vikar in their research on “Béla Bartok’s Folk Music Research in Turkey” (Budapest 1976) it reports: “Bartok also did field work in Turkey and during his short visit in 1936 he collected 87 folk songs, of which twenty were related to the Hungarian folk songs. … Bartok pointed out in his conclusion that this discovery of his has international significance, and it shows that the Turkish and the Hungarian music has a common origin, which is from Central Asia and the surrounding area.” From: RuthD (Cambridge)

Language forces us to perceive the world as man presents it to us. ~ Julia Penelope