On the third day Phil announced we would attempt the crossing to Morocco, especially since a good wind was blowing. I was excited, despite the fact that I barely knew what I was doing. The straits we’d be crossing marked the entrance to the Mediterranean Sea. For Phoenicians who sailed through here three thousand years earlier it was the end of the world. For ancient Greeks it was a portal into the great unknown. Columbus tested his ships here, and so did Magellan. All of these explorers sailed through these fabled gates into the great unmapped Atlantic.
We had just made it out of the harbour when Phil glanced up at the sky. “I fink we better get our harnesses on.”
I frowned. “Harnesses?”
“Yeah, you’re going to need them.”
He wasn’t kidding. Out in the straits the wind whipped up to thirty-eight knots. All of a sudden we were skudding across the waves almost out of control. I pulled on the necessary ropes and winched when I could, though truthfully most of the time I held on to the railing for dear life while the roiling waves crashed over me. Phil stood in front of me, manning the wheel, laughing maniacally into the wind.
Halfway over to Africa, Phil pointed at the whitecaps as a pair of dolphins shot out of a cresting wave. They were like torpedoes, and soon a pod of them wove in and out of our wake. It was a magical moment.
“Carlos,” I called, “is that you out there?”
After a few hours, the waters calmed a bit and the sandy red hills of Morocco appeared in the distance. Phil looked at his watch and began to yip. “We’ve made a record crossing. That’s the fastest one I’ve ever done.”
“Great, Phil, that’s just great,” I said.
Jutting from the shoreline was the little rock tumble of Isla del Perejil. I didn’t see any goats, but the Moroccan flag was gone. The War of Parsley Island was finished, and Europe, apparently, had come through victorious again. The great continent of empires remained unscathed.
Coming into Istanbul by sea is enchanting. The minarets of the Blue Mosque come into view over crumbling medieval walls, and Topkapi Palace, ancient home of sultans and harems, tips down to the water’s edge. As visitors proceed through the Golden Horn, they spy on a hillside the dusty red dome of Hagia Sophia, the first great basilica of Christendom. Everything is much as it would have been for the Crusaders a thousand years before.
Istanbul is the crossroads of the world. At its back lies Europe, to the south is Africa, and to the east, across the Bosphorus, is a great slab of land jutting from Asia — Asia Minor in the old books, the Ottoman Empire until the end of the First World War, and now simply Turkey.
It’s quite fair to say there’s no other country on Earth quite like Turkey: Muslim but not Arabic, an ally of both Europe and its Islamic neighbours, a secular democracy tucked between the flashpoints of the Balkans and the Middle East, unsure which way it should turn.
The Turkish language, too, is an anomaly. It’s a member of the Altaic family of languages, but like the country itself it snakes its roots through both the West and the East. The written text, for example, is now produced in the Latin alphabet. This momentous change occurred in 1928 when Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the father of modern Turkey, declared that his country would adopt a Western script. The language had previously been written in Arabic, but many of its written conventions didn’t seem to suit Turkish.
Atatürk was warned by his advisers that changing the written language would take several years of consultations and at least five more years to implement. But Atatürk declared that the changeover would be done in three months, and such was his leadership that the shift was accomplished in only six weeks. The old writing system was forbidden by law, and it’s said that Atatürk himself appeared in many parks with a slate and chalk to teach the new script to his people.
That’s the story, and despite the abundance of umlauts and little squiggles over and under letters, I could at least make out the words. Our ship pulled up under the Galata Bridge, and nosing my way through the crowds, I followed the signs to Sultanahmet, the heart of old Istanbul. Istanbul was once known as Byzantium, a Greek city. In the Roman era it became Constantinople — the city of Constantine the Great.
I eventually found a little hotel not four hundred metres from Hagia Sophia. In 537 A.D. this grand domed church rose above the city, centuries before the great Gothic cathedrals of Europe were even contemplated. It remained a Christian church for almost a thousand years and then it was a mosque for a further five hundred. Now it’s a secular museum. Across from Hagia Sophia is the Blue Mosque. Both buildings have minarets, one at each corner, and both are capped with giant domes, but the Blue Mosque isn’t blue at all. Its polished stones are more like silver, glimmering under the great azure sky. The Turks took Constantinople for their own in 1452, and shortly thereafter erected this mighty twin companion of Hagia Sophia.
Since then the city has been Istanbul, at the edge of two very different worlds. This, I thought, made it the perfect place to see where the strange brushes up against the familiar, to watch what happens when one understanding touches another.
In Turkey there’s plenty to buy and lots of people willing to sell. Turks haggle most unmercifully. The shopkeepers call out greetings and invite you in for apple tea. If you accept, you’re hooked.
“I want to buy a carpet” in Turkish is Hali almak istiyorum. The word order is pretty odd. “Carpet to buy I want” would be the literal translation. It’s a sentence I would caution against saying too loudly. You’ll be mobbed and you’ll have enough carpets slapped in front of you to cover a small country.
Turkish also makes me think about Noam Chomsky again. Here is the sort of grammatical structure he talks about. There are rules to how things move around, Chomsky says. Just as in mathematics where a formula like a2 + 2ab + b2 very neatly transforms itself into (a + b)2, Hali almak istiyorum becomes “Carpet — to buy — I want” and finally “I want to buy a carpet.”
Yes, the underlying structures are the same. Chomsky is correct, at least about grammar. The thing is, though, a grammar is not a language. It’s the clockwork of a language, the gears and cogs that spin it into being, but it’s not the language itself. What good ol’ Chomsky misses is the most important element of all. He neglects to talk about the words. He forgets to specify exactly what the a2 or the b2 stand for, and that’s where things start to get interesting.
The word hali, for example, is translated as carpet, but does that mean it corresponds exactly to our word carpet? I’m not sure. What we call a carpet is the thing we order from a store that sells rugs. We choose the colour, say, rose or a simple beige weave, and that’s it. Or we might purchase a throw rug at Ikea because it’s on sale or because it looks as if it might match our wallpaper.
In Turkey a halim (the full root) is an ancient art form. I saw women working on looms, painstakingly