Musings on English, Turkish and French

That the English language is a rich one is evidenced by the fact that almost all languages have borrowed from it to make up for deficiencies in their own vocabulary. Even the French, who are so proud of the capabilities of their own tongue, couldn’t stop Franglais, despite imposing fines on the media for using it. The French people think “le weekend” just seems to say it better than “la fin de la semaine.”

Although Turkish has very few loans from English, a handful of English words have entered it indirectly through French, or more accurately, through that not very respectable part of it called Franglais. The Turkish language has scads of real French words in it rendered phonetically as heard through a Turkish ear- i.e., (tr)apartman/(fr)appartement/(eng)apartment), (tr)tuvalet/(fr)toilettes/(eng)toilet, (tr)pusula/(fr)boussole/(eng)compass– as France had great influence on the Ottomans. As part of its continuing predilection for the French language, it has also adopted Franglais like “miting” (meeting) and “full,” both pronounced in Turkish just like the French say them. They’re used slightly differently in each language- meeting, for example, has mainly political connotations in Turkish – but both languages seem to have effectively filled a hole in their dictionary.

English is not always the lender, however. Sometimes the English word is recognized as deficient in some way and the language looks to borrow itself. Like our French friends and “weekend,” some think “fait accompli” says something importantly different than “done deed."

But even if you’re skeptical about that difference and avoid French terms as pretentious, you’d have to admit it would compromise your meaning if you substituted “deadly woman” for “femme fatale” in a review of- and try this one on for size - a film of "black cinema."

If you look, you will find that scads of other languages have useful words and expressions that we should but don’t have the equivalent for.
  

On this sign for a printers/matbaa (Arabic) in Balikesir, Turkey we have the following Turkish words borrowed from French: kartvizit/(fr)carte de visite/(eng)calling card); eşantiyon (eşantiyon takvim are giveaway calendars)/(fr)echantillon/(eng)sample); dijital; fotokopi; telefon; and adisiyon (restaurant or hotel checks)/(fr)addition/(eng)restaurant bill. Fatura (invoice) may be derived from the French ‘facture’ (invoice), and fiş (receipt) is most certainly 'fiche,' which can mean sheet or slip of paper.  Fax is probably borrowed from French, though the Turkish spelling should be "faks." GSM, which stands for Global Systems for Mobile Communication, here just meaning a cell phone, may be the only salute to English. (But a French friend argues it really means Groupe Speciale Mobile!) 
Even when I try I can only think of a few bona fide borrowed English words in Turkish: one is teyp, pronounced like “tape,” meaning car tape player. Untypically, English was chosen over French but I think only because 'magnétophone' is such a mouthful, not to mention a bit quaint.

There also seem to be cases when English should seek to replace a word but doesn’t.

I recently learned a new term, a name for a piece of furniture, which fits this bill. When I first heard it uttered my thought was, “Gadzooks, what a clunky word!”

The word is “trundle.”

We were going to buy a new single bed for my son’s room and were intrigued by a type where a second smaller bed on wheels pulls out from beneath a larger one. When we were looking, the salesman never referred to it by any special name, and when we came to buy it, I simply called it “the bed with the second bed inside it.” I assumed it was a Turkish invention.

A few months later, when my sister arrived for a visit and we were showing her our son’s room, she remarked, “Oh, you have a trundle bed.”

If they had asked me earlier on a quiz show to define trundle bed, I would have guessed, after remembering my grandmother’s small studio apartment, that it was one which pulled out of the wall.

But I would have been buzzed off. My sister was right. The dictionary definition of trundle bed is ”a low bed on wheels that can be stored under a larger bed.” (I’ve now checked and found that, as you probably know, my grandmother’s bed is called a “Murphy bed.”)

But why is the word “trundle” used to refer to this bed? Just our language instincts tell us that this unpleasant sounding word would be associated with something heavy, awkward or of great force, as in “The tanks trundled over enemy defenses.” In fact the dictionary definition is (referring to wheeled vehicles) “to move slowly and heavily, typically in a noisy or uneven way : ten vintage cars trundled past.” A person, it says, would move in a similar way: “She could hear him coughing as he trundled about.” This doesn’t seem to have anything to do with the bed I bought.

I have found, however, that the original mid-16th century word “trundle” meant only “small wheel or roller,” far from the more recent phlegmatic meanings of the verb, so we can assume that the name just comes from the fact that the hidden bed is on wheels.

All the above is according to the 2011 Oxford American Dictionary. The 2003 Cambridge Dictionary includes the additional and surprising fact that "trundle" is an American noun, and that the British term is "truckle bed." Though the Brit's choice of word is not much better sounding, it is passable- at least not embarrassing. This leaves the onus for "trundle" squarely on American shoulders.

But if having wheels is the reason we call this bed "trundle," then I would have to say the name is even a lamer pick than I first thought. The least remarkable thing about the bed is that there are wheels on it. What’s impressive is that, like magic, one bed pulls out from another and- on our model, anyway - has scissor spring feet so that it rises to the height of the other bed. They become a matching pair. When two guests arrive to sleep over, this seems very ingenious indeed. Calling such a nifty invention in effect “a bed with wheels” is like naming a bed that ingeniously pulls down out of the wall a “hinge bed.” (The name 'Murphy Bed' honors the inventor.)

I’d suggest that we start looking to foreign sources for a better name but in fact I have already located one.

One day while I had my head under the trundle bed looking for coin that had rolled under it, I hit my head on the metal frame. As I examined the area to see what exactly had caused so much pain, I found a small, paste-on sticker identifying the bed’s model, manufacturer, etc. Much to my delight, I discovered that the Turkish name for this bed was “yavrulu baza.” Baza means bed base or box spring, while yavru means offspring or young child, and very often is used to mean kitten or pup. The lu in yavrulu is the preposition “with.” Together you have something like “bed with child”.

You have to admit that is a great way of describing this bed. Turkish, perhaps because it’s neither a Latin or Germanic language (it's in a small group with Finnish and Hungarian), introduces American or European learners to some fresh and original ways of saying things. You often come across words and expressions which seem much more apt or descriptive than the English.

Unfortunately, I don’t think most English speakers would be comfortable with the Turkish term for trundle bed. The only Turkish word in English is yogurt- they invented it – but five syllables (ya-vru-lu ba-za) would be too adventurous for us. I propose, therefore, that if we do replace this God-awful word "trundle" with the Turkish- and we will have to jump start it because any replacement is just not forthcoming - we use an English translation. What, exactly, could be left to the people.

Dialog in the Year 2030 Between an American Woman and her Visitors

Host: It’s getting late. Maybe you two should spend the night. The bed in the upstairs guestroom is a pup bed, so it would be no trouble.

First Guest: A pup bed? Great! We’d love to stay over.

Second Guest: You know, my mom was telling me that pup beds were called trundle beds, of all things, in the old days.

Host: Trundle?! Isn’t that the name of an ogre that roams the Norwegian fjords?

First Guest: Ha! Can you imagine inviting friends, like, 'Please feel welcome to stay over tonight - we’ve got a wonderful trundle bed waiting for you two.'

Second Guest: Yeah, 'Sorry, we got a pie in the oven.'  

Host: It goes to show you that a language is like an intelligent organism. When a word is unsatisfactory in some way, it seeks out a replacement. I wonder where pup bed comes from.

First Guest: It’s just cute enough to be American, but I’ll check it out on Wikipedia and see what they say. (Starts jabbing at his iPhone, then starts scanning the entry.) Says here that it is not really of American origin after all but that the term pup bed is derived from a translation of the Turkish name for this kind of bed: yah-VROO-loo- something like that -BA-zah, which means literally box spring with child. Apparently, the words "bed with child" were first used on Craigslist around 2014 and soon became so popular as a substitute for the brutish sounding trundle that it replaced it in English usage by 2020. However, it is surmised by linguists that because some speakers in North America were offended by the connotations of bed with child, the term pup bed began to be used as a substitute and eventually, because of its immensely more appealing associations, replaced the previous term.

Host: Well, thank God for that, otherwise you’d be back to square one with, ‘Please, won’t you spend the night…we have a wonderful bed with child for you upstairs in the guest room.’

Second Guest: In any case, score one point for the Turks. For all the years that they’ve been dragged through the mud, having for the last 60 years to deal with the image in the film Midnight Express, taking flak for being so stubborn about Cypress, for the treatment of the Kurds, and especially for the history with the Armenians…after all that negative, finger-pointing press, finally they get some positive recognition.