There is an old and thoroughly disreputable way of learning a language, and I recommend it warmly: take a grammar workbook written for learners of some other language, ignore the language it teaches, and translate its example sentences into the one you actually want.
Generations of English schoolboys did this without knowing it, under the name of prose composition—turning English sentences into Latin until something clicked. I do the same with Murphy’s English Grammar in Use, that blue brick familiar to every learner on earth, except that I render the examples into Turkish instead of doing the exercises as printed.
And it works. Today I came upon an example that made me want to applaud the Turkish language standing up. Not for ornament—for a rare mastery of concision.
Ten words against four
English: The knife with which he cut the bread was blunt. Ten words. And before anybody objects that nobody talks like that—quite so. In speech one would say the knife he cut the bread with, shunting the preposition to the end and dropping the pronoun altogether. That gets it down to nine. It does not get it down to four.
Because here is the Turkish: Ekmeği kestiği bıçak kördü.
Four words: better than two English words to the Turkish one, an exchange rate any traveller would take.
- ekmeği—“the bread,” in the accusative;
- kestiği—a participle in -dık, which does the work of the entire relative clause: “that he cut”;
- bıçak—“knife”;
- kördü—“was blunt.”
Read literally, it comes out as something like the-bread his-cutting knife was-blunt. There is no relative pronoun, because there is no relative clause. And there is no with, because the participle does not care where the knife stood in the original sentence—subject, object or instrument, it attaches to the head word all the same and lets context sort out the rest.
Which is the whole trick, really. Where English builds a second storey onto the sentence, Turkish widens the ground floor. Nothing is subordinated to anything; everything queues up before the head word and waits its turn.
I have written elsewhere about what this does to a person’s thinking; here I only note the result.
Brevity is the soul of wit? In this instance, the soul of genius.
