I like treking and can walk all day. Anyone wishing to roll up must have enough stamina to keep up with. If we can form a group of 10-15 people, we could put up tents at night eating our dinner around a campfire. Ideally, there could be someone playing the guitar or the banjo accompanying a choir made up with classmates. An ideal setting for this could be Cappadocia or the Black Sea coast. We could rent a bus with a driver or a couple of jeeps to get us to the region.

Maybe we can create a tour of our own exclusively for Turkish Class users. There must be no commercial expectations from such a tour. The organization may include some treking and sight-seeing activities.

There are people who have known one another for a long time. This will also give them a chance to know one another.

Spanish women are very likeable indeed but I don't like them a bit since I am married...

When I was serving my military duty in Narlidere, Izmir, I learned that there are lots of wild boars in the mountains on the Aegean coast. (Like everywhere in Turkey). We were marching to somewhere as a group of 30 or so soldiers then we came accross with a flock of boars about as many as we were. They stopped somewhere further up from where we were on the dirt road that we were climbing. As there was no going back we had to face the animals. We didn't have any rifles or weapons and were completely unprotected if the animals decided to charge us.

I intinctively began picking up some rocks and some others found some sticks. Then we saw the sergeant running to us calling us idiots yelling you can't scare a boar with rocks or sticks. We learned that even a bullet from a pistol would not penetrate its thick hide and here we are talking about 30 boars with razor sharp teeth.

We saw the same boars back in the barracks a few days later. The soldiers who lived with them for years have kind of domesticated those wild boars and they regularly visit their premises for free food.

It is not better to call Turkey as Turkia just because it sounds closer to the way Turks pronounce it. Every language has a natural path of development. No other country, its government or people have a right or power to intervene with this natural evolution of languages.

There is actually the thought that foreigners peek fun at the English name of our country on account that it also means guniea fowl. I find either making such jokes or taking them seriously equally pathetic.

In almost any language there are homonyms. The different meanings of words or their connotations in different contexts are not to be mixed. Witty people can play with words pointing out to the link between seemingly different concepts. Referring to Turkey the country and alluding to the Guinea fowl does not require so much power of imagination; it is a bit banal too.

Words are just containers. They are capable of conveying only the meanings cultures have assigned to them. It is a very long and slow process. You certainly cannot publish a few words in a website and ask people to use them. That would be a prescriptive approach. If we followed your advise and those of others' who come up with such useful replacement words, what would happen to our language?

Let's not forget we call India as Hindistan which literarily means "The land of turkeys" and Egypt as Mısır which means corn. Do you ever think of Indians as a bunch of turkeys hopping around? Of course no. If you made a joke about that you'd probably feel stupid. What about those who take those jokes so seriously so as to change the word in question.

Can Yucel wrote a poem on this here is a couple of lines I remember from it (I could not find this poem online; as far as I remember its name is Cince mi Icince mi?):

Keferenin kavlince dilince
Hintliler hindi yer her yılbaşı
Türkler de hindi

Where is Turkia? Is it a new country?

Everyone is against killing people but everyone has a certain way of protesting. I for my own part don't think I must curse Kurds running in streets with a flag in my hand.

I don't go to football matches either. I don't like cursing the referee when he makes a mistake. I have my own way of seeing things and it is certainly not the same as teenagers' who are supposed to be perpetually angry at something.

Nevertheless, I am really sorry about the bad fates of those young guys who lost their lives for this country. It might have been me 10 years ago or my brother. After all, it is my country and those are our problems.

The Turkish account of the Ottoman history was recorded by these official historians by chronological order:

Naima,Rasid,Suphi,Izzi,Vasif,Cevdet,Asim,Sani-zade,Lutfi.

For any view to hold water, you need to read all of the books written by those historians as well as the released reports on important affairs by foreign consulates in Turkey as well as the accounts of international historians.

For my part, I cannot claim to have gone through such a comprehensive research. In the absence of knowledge of histrory all we are talking about is merely based on speculations we hear from other people.

I invite everyone to be a bit careful when talking about such a vital subject. Don't forget we are talking about a genocide.

We simply cannot be proud of our taxi drivers. It doesn't help much to speak the same language either. Taxis are very much like the stock exchange when there is traffic to one direction or if it rains they become hot commodity. When you hail them they ask you where you are heading and rush away instantly if they don't like your destination. Under the circumstances, you can just expect a hitch hike class service at inflated rates. That being said taxi rates in Turkey are cheaper than elsewhere in Europe although fuel is way more expensive here.

Be very careful when giving or taking money from/to a taxi driver. Some crooks will change your money with a bad one and return it to you asking you to give him a good one.

What is the point of dealing with such wrong people? It would be best to stay away from them as much as possible. As some friends said, there are very good taxi drivers as well. I wish there were more of them.

Turks and Kurds racially and culturally as different as Eskimos are different from the French.

Kurdish is an Indo-European language while Turkish is Ural-Altaic. Hence there is simply no similarity between these two languages. There are many loan words from Persian, Turkish and Arabic in the Kurdish language. However when a Kurdish person speaks a Turkish listener will not understand anything and vice versa.

Turkish culture is very different from the Kurdish one. Turks are closer to Europeans and Kurds are to Persians to whom they are probably related.

Family structures are also completely different. Kurds live in very crowded families and generally the eldest member is the clan chief. He holds extensive authority over the rest of the family.

Kurdish women are kept under constant oppression. There are such demeaning traditions affecting women that a Western woman will find it very difficult to understand. For example, a Kurdish woman cannot look out from a window or show her hair to other males. When there is a rumour about a woman a family council may decide to kill her.

Kurds have long been neglected by the government. The government used the pretext that Kurds lived in the rugged terrain where it was impractical to pave roads or to provide services. Later on, after the completion of a number of irrigation projects famine was largely remedied. This way Kurds have become economically stronger.

Many peoples who are associated with Anatolia lay claims about the ownership of certain parts of Turkey. For example, Kurds claim that Diyarbakir is their historical capital. Similarly Armenians have claims about Van, Agri and Mt Ararat which they consider as a national symbol. Syrians claim the possesion of Hatay (Antioch)and Greeks want Western Anatolia. All of them are supported by Europeans both financially and politically.