A lot of the fun of learning any new language is seeing the ways other folks dress up their thoughts. I recently printed out a few chapters from a server service manual in Turkish, as a masochistic exercise in seeing, once, again, how little I’ve been able to learn in several years of study. But, there are compensations. New words to relish.
Such as, Mikroişlemci. Let’s take that one apart. I’m sure you recognize the prefix, Mikro. İşlem is the Turkish word for work, labor. The agent ending, -ci, means someone who works. Put it all together, and you get a teeny worker – a microprocessor.
Güç is a word frequently encountered in the New Testament. It’s what the disciples were endowed with on the day of Pentecost – force. Power. Might. Kaynak is another good NT word. It’s what Jesus sat beside in the Samaritan city. It’s what bubbles up within those who trust in Him – a well, a spring. Put the words together – güç kayağı – and you have something whose output is measured in watts. A power supply.
Let’s take apart one more expression, just for fun – çalışırken değiştirilebilir sabit disk sürücüsü. This will be a somewhat longer voyage, but come along, and you’ll agree the payoff made the trip worth while. The first word, çalışırken combines the root of the verb “to work,” çalışmak , with the “meanwhile” ending, -ırken. Next, değiştirilebilir means “something that is able to be changed. The –ebil-/-abıl- infix conveys the concept of capability. Sabit means fixed or established.
Ok, let’s go to the end of the sentence and work back. Sürücüsü is derived, first of all, from the word for herd or flock, sürü. Next we find the agent ending again, -cü. Someone whose business is flocks. Finally, we have the possessive ending –sü. (The Turks have a really crazy “belts and suspenders” way of conveying possession, since both the thing possessing and the thing possessed have case endings!) A sürücüsü is, obviously, a shepherd, a driver, a director. The word just before is probably the only one you recognized – disk. Put it all together and we have – a “while-working, able to be changed, stable disk herder.” Or, as we would say in English – a hot-swap hard drive.
