John can do...

When I arrived in Turkey in May 1958, the first thing I bought on the local market was an English-Turkish dictionary. I was a member of the advance team for our company, which had just received a contract to maintain the U.S. Air Force Bases in Turkey. We arrived in Istanbul via Pan Am after midnight. On the way into the city, all the neon signs looked so strange to me: Tuzcuoglu, HacI Bekir LokumlarI, Koç. I thought, I'll never be able to learn this language. Then I saw a sign reading is BankasI and I was sure the word "bank" was lurking somewhere in there. Since I knew one word of Turkish already, I decided to stay.

I love language. (They say marriages succeed or fail, not on sex or money problems, but on language alone.) And I love foreign languages almost as much as English. In high school and college I had taken five years of Latin, three years of French, two years of German, and loved them all. Now, here I was in a new country with an exotic new language to conquer -- Turkish! Additional signs along the way such as ÇInar Otel, Pera Palas, and Anadolu Sigorta, only fortified my decision to stay since I saw clearly in those neon lights the words "hotel," "palace," and "Anatolia. "

The next morning, before my teammates were out of bed, I left the Istanbul Hilton and hopped a "taksi" (another Turkish word I grasped easily). I ordered the driver to take me to Istiklal Caddesi (Independence Avenue) where I had seen on my tourist map in English, the University Bookstore. I leapt out, telling the driver to "Wait!" (I knew he understood that word because I hadn't paid him), and charged into the bookstore.

"Do you speak English?" I barked at the young, beautiful, dark-haired, dark-eyed girl standing behind the cash register.

"I want to buy an English-Turkish dictionary," I shouted, "Çabuk!" (Quickly) -- proud of another Turkish word I had learned the night before.

The pretty girl started shaking. "Yes, sir! Please follow me, sir!" She ran to the front of the store and grabbed the Redhouse English-Turkish Dictionary off a shelf. "Here!" she said, almost throwing it at me.

I flipped through the pages and discovered that it had no phonetic pronunciation of the Turkish words. "You wretched girl! How am I to know how to pronounce Turkish words without the phonetic spelling?"

She looked bewildered and started trembling again.

"Bring me an English dictionary and l'll show you what I mean," I said. "Çabuk!"

She reached into the front window of the shop and pulled out a copy of Merriam-Webster's Second Collegiate Dictionary of the English Language, my favorite.

"Good," I said, flipping it open at random to the first word on the page. "Look, archaeology... and in parentheses ar-ke-ol-i-je. You see?"

She started to apologize for no parentheses in her Turkish dictionary, but it was getting late so I said, "Oh, never mind, I'll take it. How much?"

I got back to the Hilton at 10:15 a.m. and found our whole team sitting on their luggage outside the entrance of the hotel. We were scheduled to fly to Ankara at 11:15 a.m via THY (Turk Hava Yollari-Turkish Air Lines).

"Hurry, John!" said Nila Springer, the only female on our advance team. "We were about to leave you here." She was our Mother Hen, our Personnel Director, but I knew she wouldn't leave without me. I ran up to my room, threw the Redhouse into my ditty bag along with my airline ticket, passport, Polaroid camera, and Baby Ruth bars (l had already packed my suitcase) -- and was down in three minutes standing beside Nila, waiting for the "otobus" to take us to the airport.

After we boarded the THY plane to Ankara, I sat down beside Nila. She opened up her thick, loose-leaf notebook of SOPs (Standing Operating Procedures) and started revising them. I opened up my Redhouse Dictionary and learned immediately that many Turkish vowels were Latin or European:
[a] as in father
[e] as in bet
[i] as in machine
[o] as in boat
[u] as in tutu

Then I learned that most of the consonants were the same as the Roman alphabet, with a few exceptions:
[ç] is pronounced ch as in China
[s] is sh as in shell
[j] is soft as in the French Jacques
[c] is a hard j as in jazz

Suddenly I realized that Turkish was completely phonetic. Every word was pronounced exactly as spelled: Amerikan, bambu (bamboo), kanser (cancer), fotograf. I got a hot flash thinking of my shameful behavior in the University Bookstore that morning. No wonder that pretty girl must have thought I was mad -- demanding a Turkish Dictionary with the pronunciation in parentheses. Oh, Allah, forgive me!

Just then I realized how to write my name John in Turkish. The J was hard [C], the o was the sound of [a] in father, the h was silent (ridiculous and unnecessary), and the n was no problem. I got so excited, I pulled out an air-sick bag from the pouch of the seat in front of me and printed on it in capital letters :

CAN

I showed it proudly to Nila.

"It's in the back," she said, jerking her thumb toward the rear of the airplane.
JT (July '97)