Tuesday, March 25, 2008

Bir kelebek gibi olmak istiyorum...

I have been told that I am dysphoric. At this point, the butterfly's freedom fills me with many sorts of envy.

The closest translation of the word dysphoria I can find in Turkish fills me with amusement and delight - rahatsızlık. Rahatsızlığım?

*Bu fotoğraf bahçemde cektim. Evimi çok özlüyorum.

10 comments:

That Armchair Philosopher said...

eeeeh. being called dysphoric should hardly fill you with delight and amusement, no matter what language! :))

rahat-(sızlık) - whats the latter mean?

rahat sounds like, well, the hindi (urdu?) word.

Roxana said...

so what exactly is rahat anyway? we have the word in romanian also (we have many words of turkish origin because we were under the domination of the ottoman empire for so long. especially related to food and well, corruption :-)
dysphoric sounds great :-) and the butterfly is so lovely. such colours...

Anonymous said...

Okay, I should add this word to my GRE prep list. Dysphoric huh? I know a good cure. It comes in pints, and can be readily found at all hours after work.

Szerelem said...

TAP:
Oh, well. I am not always in a dysphoric state. It's just the word thats so amusing

TAP, Roxana:
Rahat in Turkish shows comfort/ease/the lack of troubles. In Turkish the suffix sız/siz depicts the lack of something. So if you say, say for example, şekersız - without sugar, or sessiz - without sound i.e. quiet/silent.

Rahatsızlık then shows a state where there is a lack of ease/ comfort - some kind of uneasiness.

Also, it is amusing for me because the root word rahat exists in Hindi/Urdu as well with pretty much the same connotations and these cross currents and common words between the languages always amuse me. (Though the agglutinative structure of Turkish is very different.)

There's also the term kıpır kıpır (if I'm not wrong) that shows fidgetyness. It's amusing too :) I think it goes well with the butterfly (kelebek)

Roxana:
What does rahat mean in Romanian? I'm not surprised about the words related to food and corruption - probably some must be related to bureaucracy as well! Though isn't Romanian quite similar to Italian?

Anon: Yes, it's been my regualr medication for a while now :D

iz said...

umm....?

Alok said...

I prefer to call my ailment Anhedonia... but dysphoria is also cool I guess.

Szerelem said...

Dyphoria beats anhedonia. Anhedonia is just sad. :D

Roxana said...

yes, Romanian is similar to Italian, but we have inherited a lot of words of slavonic origin and a few from Greek and Turkish (as a result of the byzantine and ottomanic spheres of influence). it is very interesting about rahat, actually we have the word with a very different meaning, do you know the sweets that are called in English "Turkish delight"? (errr yes I know, this comes after you posting about gourmandise and so on :-) So we call this "rahat", I always thought this might be related to their turkish name. The dictionary mentions it comes from the turkish word "rahat", without saying what this word means. And then - I suppose because those sweets were quite cheap - it came to mean also "worthless thing" and from here ... well, "shit" :-)

Szerelem said...

Oh that is quite hilarious! Of course I know turkish delight!

Actually it's sometimes called rahat lokum - so I guess what it really means is little drops (lumps?) of contenment. (Though I think lokums were (are?) supposed to be good digestives which gives another meaning to rahat lokum - as in something that causes comfort and ease, in all probability after you've eaten too much!)

The Romanian twist on the word is very interesting...On a different note I am always endlessly fascinatated by the mad mix of the Balkans and the presence of Turkish words is one aspect of that. I do know that Turks aren't very liked in that part of the world and I wonder whether there's been any attempt to purify the language of the Turkish words? (In Turkey a lot of Persian and Arabic words were discarded in an attempt to purify the language and in India as well there's been more Sankritisation of Hindi since Independence...)

Roxana said...

that would explain everything :-) no, there has been no such conscious attempt, but many turkish words related to administration or politics were gradually replaced with neolatin borrowings (from french) during the 19th century. because there had been, however, attempts to prove that Romanian is the most "Latin" of all Romance languages :-), so the 19th century intellectuals thought fit to enrich our inherited latin vocabulary through massive imports from French. the result is that as much as 70 percent of our today vocabulary is latin. While we had about 16 % words of turkish origin at some point in the history, now only about 5 % survived...