Songs from my youth:

Bob Marley: Don´t Rock my Boat, Could You Be Loved, One Drop, Sweat...

They are still so nice.

...Fadime.

özlemek is a transitive verb, it takes an accusative object:

                         Seni özledim ´I missed you´.

When a transitive verb takes a causative marking it is still a transitive verb and the accusative marked element is its logical object.

                         (Bana) kendini özle|t|tin ´You made (me) miss yourself´.

The patient  -  ben  -  is marked with dative.

In order to understand the difference we could try it with an intransitive verb, say gülmek. No object. When we add the causative marking the verb begins to demand an object, though, right? So we mark the patient  -  ben  -  with accusative.

                          Beni gül|dür|dün ´You made me laugh´.

Nice quote, britturk, nice translation, Henry.

Nice causatives.

I found a couple of idioms that seemed to resemble these lines. Maybe they help us to go deeper to the meaning.

eli dar ´hard-up´

eli darda olmak ´be in financial trouble´

In this light what the prayer wants to say could mean something like ´don´t reduce my living, my bread and butter´.

This is so foxy. Literally ´don´t make (me) look for these days of mine´.

There is a saying

eski günlerini aratmak ´fray around the edges, to start to become less effective or successful´

I googled it and found it for instance in a piece of news which described a sportsman who doesn´t seem to be able to reach his old level.

So I suggest bu günlerimi aratma maybe gives something like ´don´t let me lose my success so that I would later look at these days and long for them´. There is most certainly a shorter and better way to say it in English, though.

http://tr.wikipedia.org/wiki/K%C3%B6sem_Sultan

http://www.tarihim.org/yazarlar/56-tarihimorg/584-osmanlda-kadn-sultanlar-koesem-sultan.html

A Woman Has to Do

What a Woman Has to Do

Crown Prince Ibrahim has locked himself into his room. There is obviously something going on in the palace and since the weak-headed Ibrahim has been continuously afraid of assassination for the last few years the voices make him restless. He hides his face in a pillow and mummers unintelligible words. Someone knocks the door:

- Ibrahim honey, open up, don’t be stupid again.  -  It’s his mother, the highly respected Mahpeyker Kösem Sultan, and her voice sounds excited.  – Your brother is dead. Do you understand what it means? Ibrahim, listen to me, you are Sultan of the Empire.

Ibrahim feels dizzy. He rises up and sits down on his bed, rolls his eyes from side to side and then says:

- But I don’t want to be the Sultan, mum.

I don’t know if it actually was Kösem Sultan´s aim to be the undisputable ruler of the huge Empire longer than most of his male colleagues. She just had to. There were no capable men around. Even though her name is not on the list of Ottoman Sultans she was the one who stood behind her weak husband Ahmed I, her underaged son Murad IV, her mad son Ibrahim I and her grandson Mehmed IV who ascended to the throne at the early age of six.

Kösem Sultan ruled from behind the curtain, both figuratively and literally speaking. Her daughter-in-law Turhan Sultan finally won her in crookedness and had her strangled in 1651. She failed to acchieve her power, though, and the period of strong ladies in Ottoman was finished with Kösem Sultan.

Kösem managed to maintain a surprisingly good reputation in history:

Çok şefkatli olan Mahpeyker Sultan, çevresindeki fakirlere  bir daha kimseye muhtaç kalmayacak şekilde yardım etmiştir. Her sene Receb-i Şerif ayında kıyafet değiştirip araba ile hapishanelere gider, borç yüzünden hapse düşünlerin borçlarını ödeyerek onları hapisten kurtarmıştır. Katiller hariç bütün mahkûmlara yardım elini uzatmıştır. Mahpeyker Sultan who was a very compassionate person used to help the poor around her in a way that they never became needy again. Every year during the holy month of Rajab she changed her outfit and took a carriage to prisons. She paid the debts of those who had ended up in prison because of debts. She gave her helping hand to all prisoners except murderers.

When I go I say

                            Yüzmeye gidiyorum

When I come back I should say respectively

                            Yüzmeden geliyorum

true?

But -meden has this other meaning ´without doing´. If I actually swam would it be enough to give the word stress to the last syllable or do I need to use another structure for expressing it?

Interesting. In my language we "swallow" the unpleasant thing.

Good to know. yenmek ´to conquer´ always confused me because I imagined a connection here.

Thank you, si++, tunci.

Do you think yenmek belongs to this group also? It has a clear passive meaning ´to be eaten´ and a strange (reflexive origin?) meaning ´to beat, to conquer´ whose connection to eating is a little bit hard to understand.

The verb´s active voice also has to do with becoming a victim or being forced to experience something unpleasant, at least in the idioms dayak yemek ´to get a beating´ or gol yemek ´to give up a goal´.

scalpel was a great scholar and person. He will be missed on TC.