April Showers Bring May Mosquitoes

Pictures of kids in my conversation club. All these kids are in 5th and 6th grade, most of them at my school but a handful of the boys are from other schools.

So, it's April here in Azerbaijan, which unbeknownst to me is the rainy season. This means that for the past week it's been raining every day and freezing cold, which makes me seriously wonder why everyone here celebrates Novruz and the coming of spring right before the weather turns to absolute crap for an entire month. As icing on the cake, either my change in environment or the change in weather gave me the flu, so I've spend the past 4 days locked up in my house feeling like I got hit by a Peterbilt full of influenza. I finally returned to school today, where I was scolded by teachers for being a child and being unable to take care of myself, to which I sincerely wanted to (but did not) respond that compared to the level of maturity of Azeris my age I may as well have the life experience of a Highlander, and at least I'm not 40 years old and still having my mom cook meals for me.

I've been told not to worry about the weather, because in a month it's going to start getting so hot it'll make Alabama seem like Nova Scotia, but I beg to differ. If there's one thing I know about my home state, it's that it's HOT, and I can't wait to see how my sitemate from Michigan reacts to the heat compared to me. Also the mosquitoes are already terrible and only posed to get worse as summer rolls in, but fortunately I've got an awesome mosquito net hanging over my bed to keep me safe from malaria and such. If the heat gets too unbearable I'm just gonna escape to the mountains or head to Georgia or Russia, as school will be out and I'll be out of work and bored out of my mind anyways.

On the positive side, I've got a house! A place all my own, located on the edge of town about a 15 minute walk from my school. Being able to to sit in peace and QUIET has left me quite a bit less nervewrecked than I was with my host family, but it is not without it's difficulties. Foremost is the water situation, which isn't intolerable but is far from ideal. Basically, I've got a hose running in from the street where the water runs for 3 hours a day, 2 in the morning at 9am and then another at 4 or 5 in the evening. It's my job to get this water from the hose into a cistern in the yard and a water tank above my hammam (shower house). Since the water has no pressure coming out of the hose, I have to use an old, worn out and fickle water pump to get the water into said containers. This has provided me with hours of hair-pulling screaming frustration, but I think after a week of messing with it I've finally got it worked out. It involves a process of plugging and unplugging the pump while repeatedly reinserting the feed hose into it so as to get a flow of water running through it, and once this is established it will flow more-or-less steadily until I get enough water in my tank. Once the water is in the tank it doesn't get any easier though, as there is no running water in the house and I have to wash my dishes in a tub in the hammam. And of course, being Azerbaijan, it wouldn't be a house without a squat toilet out in the yard, making midnight trips to the can in the freezing cold and rain quite a special delight.

All told, however, my new house is pretty sweet. I've got two rooms, so there's plenty of space to have guests over (if any of you are planning on making the trip! :). My kitchen is huge, but fairly sparse: two tables, a fridge, a small freestanding cabinet and a range. No oven, no microwave, and no insulation. The neighbors I've met are fairly nice, and it's right down the road from a place which PCVs here have dubbed "The Awesome Store", due to its western supermarket style setup, its selection of imported goods, and a fairly incredible liqour isle. If only I had more than 5 manat a day living allowance I could be dining on Russian caviar, German sausage and a bottle of Chivas Regal special reserve. But alas, one can dream.

To switch gears for a bit, I have a request for the readers of this here blog regarding the pictures you see at the top of this post. I have recently been approached by the director of my school to help make an English education library in my school. Books in English here are in short supply, and the textbooks approved by the Ministry of Education for use in schools here are legendarily awful. Mispellings, bad grammar, confusing texts and complicated lessons that are about as succinct as a Tolstoy novel. So, I would like to ask all of you, when you have the time, to look around at your local thrift stores and such for anything you think might be useful for a kid learning English to read. This includes dictionaries, thesauruses (sadly enough, I'm an English teacher and I don't even know if that's the correct plural form of "thesaurus"), classics of English and American literature, and kids books. Now don't go overboard on finding stuff, as it will cost a ludicrous amount of money to send it all here, but maybe a book or two stuffed in a padded envelope will add up to a substantial collection once they all get here. I'm going to try to find other sources for book donations, but if you guys feel inclined to help it would make a lot of little Azeri kids quite happy. Take care,

Kevo

Zen and the Art of Agglutination

Note: This post is probably going to make little sense to most of you, as it will contain references to a variety of linguistic jargon and general nonsense that probably only Jon, Robb and Ilya will care about or understand. Furthermore, the only other language I'm acquainted with is Russian, and I will use it as a comparison throughout this post, and for those of you who don't know any Russian (once again, everyone but the three people listed above), it will probably be meaningless to you. Forgive me while I indulge in a bit of language dorkery.



So, 6 months into my adventure abroad and out of all the new, strange, exciting, and occasionally unspeakable awful things I've encountered, the one that stands out foremost as both a problem and solution on all fronts is language. Here the spoken language is Azerbaijani, aka Azeri, a member of the Seljuk branch of Turkic languages. It's most closest spoken relative is Turkish, with which it is mutually intelligible, meaning that even though they are two different languages a speaker of one can understand the other. It is also somewhat mutually intelligible with Uzbek and Turkmen, though not as clearly as with Turkish. Additionally, being in the Turkic language family it is also related to Kazakh, Kyrgyz, Uighur, Tajik, Mongolian, and a bunch of other smaller languages spoken throughout Central Asia. It is not, however, related to the other langauges of the Caucusus. Georgian is a Southern Caucasian language, in a little family of its own, Armenian is an Indo-European language, therefore related (albeit loosely) to the langauges of Europe and the Indian subcontinent. Talish is spoken in parts of Southern Azerbaijan (aka Northern Iran), but its closest relative is Farsi (Persian).



Grammatically, Azeri is an agglutinative (uh-glue-tin-a-tive) language, meaning that it expresses meaning by way of suffixes added onto the end of words. For an English speaker, this is ridiculously complicated to learn at first, as there are dozens of suffixes which are used with all word types to represent different meanings. Additionally, these suffixes are all dictated by a rule present in all Turkic languages called "vowel harmony". All vowels in Azeri (a i ı o ö u ü, and an inverted "e" that won't display here) Are separated into four categories: round, unround, open, closed. The last vowel in a word dictates which vowel will appear in the following suffix. To complicate things further, various suffixes can be added onto words one after another, meaning that not only do you have to know the correct order in which to say these suffixes in order for your newly enlongated word to make sense, but you also have to take into account the category of the vowels in each previous suffix in order to say the following suffixes correctly. Here's a short example of how these suffixes are used to make sentences:



Biz=we; kitab=book; otaq=room: Bizim kitablarımız otağımızdadırlar= Our books are in our room.



The suffixes mean the following:



-im, -ımız= Possessive case, added to both the possessor and the object being possessed.

-lar= plural form

-da= Locative case, meaning (depending on context) in, at, on

-dır= Present tense third person singular of "to be"



As if this wasn't complicated enough, there are four other cases (ablative, dative, nominative, accusative) and a variety of other suffixes used in adjectives, participles, and other parts of speech.

The syntax isn't much easier either. Unlike English, with is a subject-verb-object(SVO) language, Azeri is a subject-object-verb (SOV) langauge. Therefore, verbs almost invariably come at the end of sentences, with very rare exceptions. This means that my natural inclination as an English speaker to put the verb before the object in a sentence makes me seem like a total moron when I try to speak Azeri. It's the equivalent of saying "I bread eat to like" in English.

The verbs themselves aren't that complicated though. There are no irregular verbs, putting it far ahead of Russian in terms of ease of conjugation and making English look like a grammatical trainwreck by comparison. All the conjugations for all the tenses (present, two past, two future, and a rough equivalent to past progressive) are regulated exclusively by vowel harmony and a couple of simple spelling rules. Overall, once you get the proper endings down for each of the conjugations you can easily conjugate any verb you find. Best of all, you don't have to worry about any of the perfective-imperfective nonsense and seemingly endless prefixes of Russian verbs (just imagine, in this language they only have ONE VERB for "to go"), or any of the ridiculous irregular verbs in English (buy-bought; swim-swam-swum; go-went, etc.) for which I always vehemently blame the French (see 1066 a.d. in any European history book).

Regarding vocabulary, it is mainly Turkish with a variety of borrowings from Persian, Arabic and Russian. The Persian and Arabic borrowings are clear enough, owing to their proximity and the spread of Islam. The Russian comes from 70 years of being under Russian rule prior to and during the Soviet Union. Fortunately for me, this meant that I already knew the vocabulary for all furniture, several food and a handful of other things when I arrived. However, the problems come when some people in certain regions prefer certain words in certain languages, and I have to figure out what they mean. The most common of these is "heshtat", the Persian word for "eighty" which is commonly used in place of the Azeri and Turkish "seksan". There's no telling how many times I overpaid for sodas and snacks at stores because I had no idea how much the guy was asking for.

One thing the Soviet legacy has left on this place is something I refer to as "cognitive dissonance of the foreigner", meaning that when Azeris see a foreigner, they automatically start speaking Russian to them, regardless of whether said foreigner knows it or not. This is not a problem for me, but I am one of only 5 Russian speakers out of over 100 volunteers in the country, and they are continually driven insane by sellers at the bazar who, in spite of being spoken to clearly and directly in Azeri, refuse to speak it back and insist that this white foreigner cannot possibly not understand Russian. Even I, when I approach people in stores or at the bazar, speak in Azeri, only to be responded to in Russian at least 1 out of every 3 times. It definitely keeps me on my toes, but it's also fun because since I похож на русском (look like a Russian) I can get away with claiming that I'm really from Moscow, which is generally less exciting to people here than being an American and therefore makes them leave me alone.

Finally, of all the common words in this language and various exclamations to and swearings upon Allah, there is one verb which drives me nuts: "chekmek". Nominally it means "to pull", but depending on context, it can also mean: to smoke, to weigh, to paint, to draw, to take a photo, and seemingly endless other meanings. Basically, if I don't know the right verb to say in a certain situation, I say this, and half the time I'm right. The only other sound I know which has more common meanings in Azeri is a car horn, which can mean, again depending on slight and variable context clues: hello, how are you, see you later, goodbye, coming through, come outside, answer the door, give me a call, on my way, move, or get the hell out of my way. It's too bad I don't have a car here, or I'd already be halfway to fluency.