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Is Kurdish Turkish? (1)
by
YAKUP ÇETİN*
by
YAKUP ÇETİN*
With the confidence of being able to speak several languages and years of experience abroad, I told the taxi driver in standard Turkish to take me to the city center. However, I received no verbal response from the taxi driver showing even a slight understanding of my words apart from a bewildered look. I repeat my request to the driver for a second time, upon which he uttered some words that made no sense to me. No matter how hard I tried to get my Turkish message across, I only heard the taxi driver say “Kurdish.” Both of us breathed a sigh of relief when I took out my paper with Kurdish expressions from my pocket and told him “Achem bo shehhala” (take me to the city center). Those of you who speak Turkish know that the Turkish equivalent is “Beni şehir merkezine götür.”
As you may have noticed, both of these sentences represent different languages, for they have in common neither a word nor word order. Ache (take) m (me) bo (to) Ishammal (the city center). The word order apparently shows that it is more like English, a Germanic member of the Indo-European language family, about which I will say more in the coming paragraphs. When we arrived in the crowded city center, which looks more or less like an XL size of Turkey’s Şanlıurfa, the taxi driver stopped close to the ancient Arbil citadel and said a few words in Kurdish, which I presume meant “Here we are” or “We have come to the city center.”
Even though I was told approximately how much a ride costs to the city center, that is, 2,500 Iraqi dinars, merely for research and practice purposes, I nevertheless asked the driver about the price, “Ava bechende?” which in Turkish is “Borcum ne kadar?” Again, I was not surprised to spot any similarity either between them or between “Teşekkür ederim” and “Zhor spas,” which means and sounds much closer to the Russian expression of saying “Thank you.” I got out of the taxi and, facing the historical citadel towering over this hot Mesopotamian city, I joined the swarm of people that I guessed would take me to the beehive.
The Arbil citadel is the pride of the city. This splendid structure, left over from a distant past, oversees the mystic city, whose population stands at over 1 million, mainly Kurds, Turkmens and Arabs largely involved in trade. The 7,000-year-old citadel was recently added to the UNESCO World Heritage Tentative List and is therefore currently under renovation. It was listed because it hosted the world’s greatest civilizations, including the Sumerian, Babylonian, Assyrian, Sassanid, Abbasid and Ottoman. Once revitalized, I am certain the 100,000-square-meter hilltop citadel with more than 500 old buildings inside, will soon attract countless tourists to Arbil. This city is developing fast thanks to Iraqi oil. It is also the capital of the Kurdistan Region Government (KRG) and was once called “Urbillum,” which dates back to 2300 B.C. As I toured around the Kayseri Bazaar, an old covered marketplace where you can fulfill all your shopping needs, the ezan (call to prayer) reminded me of the Muslim identity of Iraq’s third-largest multiethnic city, one located on the Silk Road between Baghdad and Mosul.
*Dr. Yakup Çetin is an instructor at Fatih University.
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