Whatchoo Say

It is a gift of Anglosphere culture that we can have obfuscatory rhetoric in any size or shape we want. Perhaps because of the wealth of options, it is not so strange that the first example that comes to my mind is from a 1978 novel titled The Empty Copper Sea. A Florida businessman disappears, presumed drowned in the Gulf of Mexico, but there is some evidence he made it across the water and is now living under a new identity. There is also some evidence that he had been selling assets and emptying bank accounts. I won’t spoil the story by revealing how he is found, or where, or in what physical or financial condition, but I do want to mention his attorney. This man is as genuinely ignorant as everyone else in their seaside town, but he feels that his client, dead or alive, still has interests to be defended. The advocate cannot agree with the idea that money was stolen, or even hidden. On the contrary, he suggests the man was fixing to turn his failing businesses around, as he had often done before, and to that end had simply “enhanced his cash position.”

Come to think of it, I’ve read quite a few stories like this – I think they had titles like The Story, or maybe The Novel, or was it The Book – but while John Grisham is a talented author, I think John D. MacDonald was better at this. What I really want to discuss, however, are the two ways we can say something in English: Germanic and Latinate. Harsher words like “stolen” and “hidden” are Germanic; gentler words like “enhanced” and “position” are Latinate. What I really want to pursue is how other cultures manage this – if indeed they do at all. What about cultures that are largely or completely Latinate? Or ones that aren’t at all? In those, what do you do when you want to sound like a pompous jerk?

It may be that riders of mass transit in Guatemala City and Mexico City say with a straight face – there being no other way to do it – that they’re using movilidad integrada. And it may be that the school system in Slovenia still says it’s dealing with Gypsy students using fleksibilna diferenciacija. I can believe education bureaucrats everywhere embrace such lingo. But what do people in, oh, Asia do?

Mainly for the mental exercise of it, I decided to revisit an idea of mine about Turks. They used to speak not Turkish but Ottoman. Then, in the 20th century, the government tried to change that, with unwonted success. I wonder though if Ottoman (a mix of Turkish, Arabic, and Persian) persists and if so, under what circumstances. Even if hardly anyone actually talks the old-fashioned way, does almost everyone understand it, and resort to it themselves whenever the occasion seems to call for high-flown language or just some obnoxious sophistry?

I did find something on the Internet claiming that there’s a place in Lebanon where folks still talk like it’s in the Ottoman Empire, but I was more interested in Turkey itself. As far as I can tell, Turkish Wikipedia’s article for the Ottoman language does not say it is still spoken anywhere. But there were some intriguing hyperlinks, and one was a list of Persian words in Turkish. That, in turn, led to a list of Persian words removed from Turkish.

I picked Persian over Arabic because there were fewer. Seemed more intellectually manageable. But I cannot confirm my notion that Persian or Arabic was historically favored for abstractions or legalisms while kaba Türkçe, rude Turkish as it was called pre-Atatürk, was used when in the market haggling over a melon or down by the riverside where women laid out laundry on rocks to dry. The words are all over the place. I’d later had the idea that the neologisms much favored by the in-its-own-weird-way-trying-to-win-a-popularity-contest Turkish Language Society alternated between hoity-toity and too aggressively the opposite, but I recognize a fair number of words in both columns of the table. I think almost all of 'em are in use, still. I am hardly good enough with the language to state for any given pair that one is favored, and whatever I do venture is heavily tilted toward what I saw in newspapers or on banners (Turkey seemed to have a lot of those) rather than heard on the street or in railway compartments. It is possible that Turks keep all such words handy, some for general use and others for special occasions. Precisely how special, I am too poorly socially equipped to say.

I know zengin retains currency because a Turkish kid desiring to shine my shoes once asked me if I was. But maybe he was wondering not merely if I was rich but why I was putting on airs. As for sarhoş, I definitely saw that word – not the modern one – in a long contemptuous article about Central Asia, the Siberian city of Omsk in particular. Maybe Soviet intoxication was considered a truly foreign condition, dour and ominous, while the Turkish version (which only once did I witness) was notable less for the guy’s mental or emotional state than the way he was extravagantly taking pulls from a bottle whose contents were red as a stoplight. When he finished, he flung the bottle out the window. Trains over there were generally full of families but, this time, all of us immediately present were male. My working theory for all Turkish behavior is What if Mom found out?
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This can work in other directions. Afrikaans seemed Dutcher than Dutch (though a Dutch immigrant told me it was more like Flemish), but for all I know it has a rich Bantu subvocabulary. Perhaps Afrikaans is the oh-so-exalted idiom, but when Boers really want to be blunt, they go for the “native” languages. As for whether blacks work it in the other direction, staying colloquial in Sotho or Tsonga or Xhosa or whatever, but at times grandly rising to Afrikaans when they really want to vapor importantly, I do not know. It is possible that in South Africa English occupies a middle ground. That’s the language everybody speaks when they just want to get information across.

Back to Slovenia, I think that nowadays if you are homosexual there, you can get an actual poroka, which is the pure Slavic word for wedding; no need to settle anymore for a partnerstvo. Back to Florida, which is where I started this post but otherwise had nothing to say about it...reconsidering now the last thing I ever said about it, I wonder if the self-identified Cubans there switch languages to emphasize points. I could not, however, tell anything of the sort from Joan Didion’s unimaginative account.