At the early stages of learning Turkish, the beginner may well conclude that its vocabulary is a poor thing. Unlike a good many European languages, it seems to want for those crowds of very nearly identical synonyms with which the finest shades of meaning are conveyed.
But its riches lie elsewhere. There are, for instance, words so compact that they can be translated only by an entire phrase.
Not long ago I came upon the verb bakakalmak, put together from bakmak ‘to look, to watch, to stare’ and kalmak ‘to remain, to stop still,’ and meaning, quite literally, “to stand and look.” It is often used in the past tense: Bakakaldım—“I stood there, and words failed me.”
Admirable brevity, and admirable precision—would you not agree?
And if you should care to see what bakakalmak looks like in stone, the eye idols of Şanlıurfa have been at it for six thousand years.
