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As part of my work as a geologist, I have traveled several times to
Turkey to examine the rocks southeast of Ankara.
On one trip a few years
ago, my Turkish colleague left me for several days to work on my own,
with a local driver named Mehmet as a guide. Mehmet spoke no English and
at that time my Turkish language skills were very primitive, but I
thought I'd be able to direct him to the rock outcrops of interest by
giving simple directions ('right', 'left', 'stop', etc.).
Mehmet had other plans for me, however. He decided that the rocks I wanted to see weren't beautiful enough and that I should instead look at the outcrops of marble (mermer) in the region.
(Marble is just about the least interesting rock type for the project I was working on, so, although it's a beautiful rock and I'd spent some time admiring the marble in the
region already, I didn't want to spend any more time looking at it.)
In any case, I didn't have much say in the matter, as Mehmet kept taking
me to marble outcrops.
I tried to explain to him that I didn't need to
collect any marble, but with my limited Turkish, all I could say were
things like "Please no marble" and "Marble not good".
This had the
surprising and disturbing effect of greatly upsetting Mehmet. He yelled
at me, shook his fist at me, and refused to drive me where I wanted. He
took me to another marble outcrop.
I tried "Marble bad", but this made
him even angrier. I flipped through my dictionary, trying other phrases,
but nothing worked. Mehmet just yelled at me some more and drove me to
another marble outcrop.
At the end of the largely wasted day, we drove
back to the guest house, mostly in silence but with occasional muttering
and random gesturing by Mehmet. Upon our return, Mehmet went and found
someone who spoke both Turkish and English and immediately went into a long tirade to this person, pointing at me, and shaking his head.
Our
translator started to laugh and asked me if I knew what Mehmet's full
name
was. I said no, I only knew his first name. Clearly this was the
source of the problem.
Mehmet's last name was Mermer (Marble)! He had
spent the whole day thinking I was insulting him -- telling him he was
bad, not interesting, not a good person. It never occurred to him I was
talking about the marble stone.....
And it never occurred to me that my
guide's name was Marble.
I have since tried to improve my knowledge
of Turkish for subsequent trips.
DW (January '98)
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Stoned Near Ankara