Languagle #16: Turkish
Baca eğri de olsa dumanı doğru çıkar
"Even if the chimney is crooked, the smoke goes up straight."
What it means
Good character shows through, whatever the circumstances. The chimney may be crooked, but what comes out of it still rises straight. Often used to mean that the truth comes out in the end, even if the path was not straight.
How to say it
ba-JA ay-REE deh ol-sa doo-ma-NUH doh-ROO chuh-KAR
Turkish c is said like j, and ç like ch. The dotless ı is a short 'uh'. The ğ is silent: it just stretches the vowel before it.
Word by word
- Baca ba-JA: chimney
- eğri ay-REE: crooked
- de olsa deh ol-sa: even if it is
- dumanı doo-ma-NUH: its smoke (duman, smoke)
- doğru doh-ROO: straight
- çıkar chuh-KAR: comes out, goes up
Doğru also means 'true' and 'right', so the proverb plays on both senses.
Where it was found
In Turkish a proverb is an atasözü, 'a word of the ancestors'. This one is from the proverbs dictionary on Dilbilgisi.net.
How to recognise Turkish
Turkish uses the Latin alphabet with ç, ş, ğ, ö and ü, plus two kinds of i: dotted i and dotless ı (in capitals, İ and I). The dotless ı and the soft ğ are the giveaways. Azerbaijani shares most of these letters but adds ə, and uses x and q, which Turkish doesn't. Turkmen has ä, ň, ý and ž instead, and Kurmanji Kurdish has ê, î and û.
About the Turkish language
Turkish is a Turkic language with over 80 million native speakers, mainly in Türkiye and Cyprus. It is agglutinative: long words are built by stacking suffixes onto a root, so a single word can say what English needs a whole sentence for. It also has vowel harmony, where the vowels in a suffix change to match the root. Turkish was written in Arabic script until 1928, when it switched to the Latin alphabet in a single reform.
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