Avrupalılaştıramadıklarımızdanmışsınızcasına

That's right, I said Avrupalılaştıramadıklarımızdanmışsınızcasına.

(I want to see how soon it shows up in search engines after this post goes live; at the moment, it gets no hits at all, in Google or MSN Search)

Anyway, it is a great word that I learned the other day in a fascinating talk about how the Turkish language works, given by Fetiye Karabay.

More on the Turkish language can be found on Wikipedia, including the fact that the agglutinative nature of the language makes such words possible....

What is the meaning of the word, you ask? Oh, I get it. You must not know Turkish very well. :-)

It means

"As if you are one of those whom we haven’t Europeanized"

[Hamza GÖLYERİ noted that a better translation would be:
"As if you are one of those whom we weren't able to Europeanize"

Which is a fascinatingly ironic word in my opinion, given how "Europeanized" or at least Turkicisized you would have to be to understand the agglutination, vowel harmony, allomorphy, stem changes and reduplication of Turkish that a small child who speaks the language understands effortlessly.

Even just imagining the issues with word breaking and stemming can make a man with notions of linguistic aptitude dizzy.

And does, let me tell you.

I will probably talk about things such as Turkish vowel harmony another time, as they are a fascinating language feature that helps put the whole dotless/dotted uppercase/lowercase I thing in a more interesting context than the usual annoyed grunts from people due to 

• only knowing about it after reading the original or version 2 .NET string recommendations;
• having experienced the bugs their software products hit on Turkish systems, due to actual user complaints.

If you know what I mean....

This post brought to you by İ and ı (U+0130 and U+0131, a.k.a. LATIN CAPITAL LETTER I WITH DOT ABOVE and LATIN SMALL LETTER DOTLESS I)