All three comments made by Delikizin, TheJanissary and catwoman are extremely prejudicial. Delikizin considers herself more like a Turkish man from personal freedom point of view which is only proper for rural or small town Turkey and quite wrong for majority of women in the big city. TheJanissary made an assumption that men in Turkey show over indulgence in blondes. That is true in all societies where blondes, brunettes or red heads are rare. If that were the only factor, there would be multiple love affairs and fighting over her hand which I don´t believe is the case here. Most people are sane enough to know their friends. Catwoman on the other hand made a nose dive into the matter driven by a singular stimulus: feminist sensitivity.

To put the record straight, Turkey is behind Europe from personal freedoms point of view but by only a certain percentage. It is wrong to assume Europe sets a model for all. In fact, Europe must take substantial steps in order to educate its people in matters ranging from sexuality, racism and xenophobia and all the prejudices it creates. We should also stop considering Europe as a singular entity. There are various cultures and values in it too. Furthermore, we should stop pointing our fingers at unfortunate others. Just as you cannot help poverty and ignorance in your ghettos, you can´t help poorer or less fortunate countries.

From what I can observe, the greatest step ever made towards this point of view in the last few decades has sadly been the song: We Are the World, We Are the Children. Everyone is keeping their power for themselves and the world turns into an arena where there are lambs facing lions.

There is unfortunately a big lack of communication between the two sexes in this country. This is not very true for those who live in better neighborhoods. As they call them, they are the white Turks and I think I fall into this group. We tend to stay away from the restrictive aspects of life. We have a totally different understanding of religion, friendship and life in general. Sometimes, we are blind to the realities of this country. We tend to have idealized notions about Turkishness.

Many a typical Turk honestly describes himself  as an opportunist who takes advantage of every opportunity for the bread money. Europe  therefore, is quite attractive to him. He fancies a world where he can live his own life at the expense of others. I have encountered many young people from poorer circles who sought exactly this form of life abroad. There are exceptions for these people as well. They are extremely faithful to their own family and kinsmen. They consider foreign women as a stop over on the way to marriage, a good opportunity to taste the pleasures of life before stepping into a usually arranged marriage with a person who can be approved by his family. Of course, there are people of other kinds too but this is sadly the general outlook.

You can´t expect people of this sort to have genuine friendships with the other sex. They are usually sly enough to take full advantage of the naiveness of their foreign friends. Of course, in such matters no one cares about what kind of a fame Turkish men in general will gain as a result. The fame is currently quite bad and it is getting worse. If your boy friend wants you to pay a debt, send him a phone, you should really be suspicious of him.

I know this is getting a bit off topic but since this is becoming rather irritating, I wanted to say a word of caution.

I too have many female friends and there is no such thing like it being impossible between different sexes.  After a certain age, sex is no longer a primary objective in life. Of course, this does not apply to hormone driven teenagers.

It is said that Polish speakers and can communicate with the speakers of the Bulgarian language to some extent. A similar situation exists between  Italian-Romanian, German-Yiddish etc. Is there indeed mutual intelligibility among Turkic languages. There is a panturanist movement that tends to exagerate similarities. According to them, all Turkic languages are just the dialects of the same protolanguage. 

To prove how true this assumption is I listened to speeches and songs in as many Turkic languages as I could. Here are the results.

Azeri Language:

This one is probably the easiest to understand for a Turkish speaker. You can almost completely follow all the dialogues. There are differences in vocabulary but most of the time, they either use a similar, archaic or less prefered version that exists in the extended vocabulary. There are some loan words from Russian many of which can still be understood. Once you realize that the Russian word for car is "mashina" and that many English loan words are to be pronounced the Russian way, many of your problems in this language disappear. Azeri language sounds a bit funny to a Turk since there are differences in vocabulary occasionally giving the sentence a weird meaning.  In the Azeri language, they say "denize düþtüm" when they want to say I took a sea bath. In Turkish however, the exact  same sentence means I fell into the sea. Similarly, they use "fell" to describe the landing of a plane which translates into Turkish as the plane has crashed. Not good news, when you hear this at the airport expecting to meet your friends or relatives coming by plane. There are so many other sentences producing wild translations. If an Azeri person drinks soup in a Turkish restaurant and complains of "sümük" in the soup, the waiters and the restaurant owners may find themselves in a miserable situation since sümük in Turkish means mucus whereas in Azeri it only means bone. If you ask for a bardak at an Azeri restaurant the waiter might be very offended. Bardak in Azeri means woman whereas it means glass in Turkish.

Uzbek Language:

I listened to a clip featuring a prominent linguist raving about the charactersitics about the Uzbek language. The intonation was unmistakably Turkish so were most speech sounds. He spoke slowly and in a clear manner which probably made it easy for me to understand 80% of the monologue.  When listening you´d find there are strings of words which are exactly the same in Turkish and when the going is like that then comes the anticlimax, there are other strings of words which make you think you are listening to a Turkish speech and that you are unable to understand your own language. The linguist was talking about the current state of the Uzbek language, the loan words from Arabic, Persian and Russian and the efforts to base the tokening of new words on the internal resources of the language. He went on to say something which I also support: prescriptive approaches are doomed to fail. We must rely on social dynamics that give shape to language. In other words, people´s preferences must be the main channel by which a language develops. 

Uzbek songs, especially fast ones are not very easy to understand. Sometimes, you listen to a phrase which is completely meaningful in Turkish but you can not understand it at first blush. These sentences are gramattically correct but semantically wrong in the Turkish language.

Tatar Language

I listened to a poem read by a female Crimean Tatar.  This language is unbelievably close to modern day Turkish. The main difference between the two languages is the presence of a few different suffixes which seem to be quite easy to learn. The intonation is slightly different. Sounds a bit under Russian influence but I may be wrong. The basic vocabulary is almost the same however there are certain words only used in the Tatar language. On the whole we can talk about very good mutual intelligibility.

To be continued...

Until recently the UK was the natural ally and a major supporter of the US policies shaped by the NEOCONS.

Today, they say they have begun revoking arms export licenses to Israel over worries that spare parts to be supplied to the could be used in Ghazza adding this would not amount to a partial embargo. They also say that they have taken this decision as a result of the efforts of parliamentarian and non-government organizations.

Whatever angle you look at it, there is deceit undercover...

 Couldn´t get the joke here...

I am sure he comes to the UK more often. So don´t be jealous.

I think I  have about 300 LP´´s. As long as you use a good quality stylus and store them vertically in a place free from dust and humidity, they will last for ages. If you have a good hifi system, you´ll get the best mileage by keeping them. If you keep them just because they are not available on another medium, you might consider getting one of those phono to usb converters (e.g. from Project Audio). If you decide to discard them you might send them over to me instead 

You may know it yourself too. Don´t ever attempt to listen to the LP´s in your collection with a stylus whose condition you don´t know. This will ruin all the LP´s you listen.

We both need and are destined to have advocates of certain causes. The constant friction between them and what is considered to be the norm shatters the status quo and gives way to advancement.

Leave the tree alone...

With tickets secured month ago, we went to Santana concert at Kurucesme on a boat that took us right to the concert venue. We positioned ourselves right in front of the stage and began waiting. The famous guitar guru drew our attention to the beautiful full moon rising behind us over Bosphorus and the night began. It was a non-stop music feast that continued for almost two hours. The sound of the exotic instruments, the virtuoso of Carlos and the flawless rendering of his songs by his two virtually nameless but equally powerful singers turned what would otherwise be an extremely boring night into a festival. 

Carlos Santana had given a concert in Turkey some 20 years ago. I could not help thinking whether there will be another 20 years for either of us.

During his brief address to the audience he said he still considered himself a hippy and that he paid no attention to money. Somehow, many of the people who keep saying that are multimillionaires. He also said, he believed in the power of love and not in the love of power.  He can´t be supporting Bush, need I say more?