I thought I would share one of the things that keeps me amused out here
– names. Turkish names – Christian
names, surnames and even place names
often have me chuckling.
While most English names have a meaning if you dig into them, it isn’t
often immediately obvious. The
exceptions are ‘hippy’ style names like River and some of those used by
eccentric stars – Apple and Peaches spring to mind. In Turkey, these sort of names are common;
Rain (one of our nieces’ names), Leaf, River, Stream, New Moon, Tulip, Love and
Wish are all popular girls names, Iron, Soil, Eagle, South, War, Peace and Lion
for a boy.
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| just a nice sunset the other day! |
Some of these are very pretty names – both in sound and meaning. But there are some whose meaning seems to me
just weird. Why would you call your
child ‘Enough’? Our second cleaner last summer went by this rather strange name
and readily admitted to me that as the fifth child her parents had chosen it
for her to show they wouldn’t have any more children – and then gone on to have
two more!
For a boy, what about ‘Help’? In
my book of children’s names it says that as well as meaning ‘one giving help’
it is – like ‘enough’ – a name given to a (planned) last child. As in ‘god help
me’? Honestly!
Here’s another one that makes Cem laugh on a frequent basis. An affectionate shortening of the name Mehmet
is ‘Memiş’ (pronounced Memish), now used as a name in its own right. Unfortunately ‘memiş’ is also a common word
for breasts – a bit like boobs. Cem
knows a man who is quite an important civil servant who goes by this name and
every time he calls, Cem starts quietly sniggering and I know it is ‘boobs’ on
the phone!
Surnames, having been made compulsory by Atatürk, were often chosen to
highlight the character of the namee…which makes you wonder why people chose
things like ‘Madaxe’, ‘Blackpants’, or even better ‘Without pants’. Sometimes it is the combination of the two
names which makes it funny. We know a
family with the name ‘Fox’ who chose to give their son the name ‘Strange’: ‘Strange Fox’ – sounds more like a Red Indian
than Turk!
Finally place names. Just before
we got to Uludağ where we went skiing we went through the small town of ‘Grasshopper’. Here are some other good ones: the villages of ‘Mad’, ‘Useless ones’, ‘Calf’,
‘Son of a Goat’ and ‘Mad Ali the servant’.
And one for Frank….’Bald ones’ village!
I suppose you could have the same fun with some of our place names and
even surnames - Cem thought Winterbottom
was pretty funny when he first heard it.
Talking of which, I have a funny story about names. The first time Cem and I were in England together
we were renting a car. As it was being
brought to the house, I checked on the phone whether Cem as a Turkish licence
holds would be able to be listed as a named driver. They said fine, as long as they could
understand his licence.
As the Turkish driving licence has everything written in English under
the Turkish we didn’t think there would be a problem. However, the not-so-bright man who delivered
the car took his licence and looked long and hard at it. I started to show him how under ‘Sürücü
Belgesi’ it said ‘Driving Licence’ and under
‘Soyadı’ it said ‘Surname’ but he still looked puzzled and eventually said:
‘But his name is foreign – how do I translate that?’
And now....watch the cat and the rabbit!
