The mutual influence of language, habits of thought and culture is a much-discussed business. Which of them comes first is hard to say; but the ways in which the influence shows itself are sometimes remarkably entertaining.
Take Turkish.
Commanding in all three persons
Turkish has imperative forms for all three persons: first (I, we), second (you) and third (he, she, it, they).
English has a dedicated imperative for the second person only: Go! For everything else we fall back on a periphrasis with let—let me go, let us go, let him go—which carries rather more permission in it than command. When an Englishman says “let him go,” he might be issuing an order, or he might be asking you to unhand the man. Turkish has no such ambiguity.
The Turks command themselves and others without the slightest embarrassment:
- Gideyim! “I’ll be off, then!”
- Git! “Go!”
- Gitsin! “Let him go / he is to go!”
- Gidelim! “Let’s go!”
- Gidin! “Go, all of you!”
Where English keeps the same thing in a jar
Note that third-person form. It can be a wish:
- Allah korusun! “God save us!”
- Kolay gelsin! “May what you are doing come easily to you”—the standard greeting to anyone at work.
- Geçmiş olsun! “May what you are suffering be past”—said to the ill and the unlucky.
Or a flat instruction:
- Temizlikçi temizlesin! “The cleaner is to do it.”
And here is the thing: English has exactly this construction, and keeps it in a display case. God save the King. Long live the Queen. So be it. Come what may. Heaven forbid. Perish the thought. Suffice it to say. Every one of them is a third-person command, and not one of them can be extended to anything new. You cannot say the cleaner clean it and be understood.
We had the machinery. We put it in a museum and now visit it on state occasions. Turkish uses it to sort out the washing-up.
The causative
There is also a voice we lack altogether: the causative—a verb form meaning “to bring it about that something happens.”
durmak “to stop, come to a halt” ➡️ durdurmak “to stop something, to bring it about that it halts.”
Otobüs durdu, “the bus stopped.” Şoför otobüsü durdurdu, “the driver stopped the bus.”
English does this with a helper verb: make, have, get. Sign it! (İmzala!) as against Get the boss to sign it! (Patrona imzalat!). Kesmek is “to cut”; kestirmek is “to have it cut,” which is what you do at the barber’s.
But we once had the machinery here too. Germanic had a causative suffix, and it has left a scattering of fossils across the modern language, in pairs we no longer notice:
- fall → fell (to make fall—hence a feller of trees)
- sit → set (to make sit)
- lie → lay (to make lie)
- rise → raise (to make rise)
- drink → drench (originally, to make drink)
Which is durmak ➡️ durdurmak exactly. The difference is that Turkish can do it to any verb it likes, on the spot, while English has five or six survivors and a great deal of confusion about lay and lie.
Some Turkish pairs are startling once you see them, because the causative has become the ordinary word:
anlamak “to understand” → anlatmak “to explain”—that is, to make understand.
gelmek “to come” → getirmek “to bring”—to make come.
And then the double causative
Now brace yourself. Turkish can do it twice: to bring it about that somebody brings it about that something happens.
- Öğrenciler sınıfı temizledi — “The students cleaned the classroom.”
- Öğretmen öğrencilere sınıfı temizletti — “The teacher had the students clean the classroom.”
- Öğretmen öğrencilere sınıfı temizlettirdi — “The teacher had the students get the classroom cleaned”—by somebody else, that is; the students were to arrange it, not to do it.
English needs a queue of auxiliaries and a following wind to express that third sentence. Turkish adds one small syllable.
Delegation—that great modern managerial virtue—expressed by a single suffix. A hierarchy of command, folded into the morphology, in a language whose speakers have had a good deal of practice at both giving orders and receiving them.
