I am sitting through a compliance training in Turkish and catch myself thinking that this is not merely a corporate obligation but a full session of sociolinguistics. Herewith the choicest findings—the sort that make one look at these tediously familiar terms from an entirely new angle.
In Search of Harmony
The word uyum, used to render “compliance” in Turkish, means in its first sense “harmony.” Just imagine how the atmosphere of our offices would alter if we adopted that logic:
- instead of a grim Compliance Department—a Department of Harmony;
- instead of tedious audits—the implementation of the principles of harmonious being;
- and instead of a Compliance Officer, the proud title of Harmonist. Which does, you must admit, sound rather different—and carries the faint suggestion of a man who can hold a tune.
“A Wrong Turning”
The Turkish yolsuzluk means, literally, “pathlessness,” or the condition of one who has strayed from the road (yol ‘path,’ -suz ‘without,’ -luk the suffix forming a noun from an adjective).
One thinks at once of certain recent statements by public officials. It turns out they are not breaking laws at all; they have merely lost their way—or, as the preferred formula has it, mistakes were made. In this there is a remarkable inheritance from nomadic thinking: ethics here is not a frozen code of rules but the correct road. Take a wrong turning, and you find yourself at the very epicentre of yolsuzluk.
The Shadow of the Guardian
The term rekabet (competition) has travelled an epic route: from Arabic through Persian into Turkish. The most intriguing part is the semantic somersault:
In the Arabic original, the root pointed to a “guardian” or “watcher.”
The shift came about through medieval poetry. In the classic plots, the “guardian”—of a lady’s chastity, or merely of her peace—was invariably the chief adversary and rival of the ardent lover. And so jealous surveillance turned into competition in the marketplace.
Thus does ordinary corporate training turn into a piece of cultural detective work. Language really is remarkably honest about the mentality behind it.
While the Western world constructs its rigid frameworks of “conformity to the rules,” here, at the meeting point of cultures, business processes acquire an unexpected poetic depth. And when one thinks about it, the ideal corporate culture in Turkish looks rather beautiful: it is when you keep to the path, evade the jealous guardian-rivals, and dwell in perfect harmony with the law.
That, I think, is a compliance I could be ready for.
