Last night at the dinner table....
Ayse: "wah wah wah wah wah wah (Turkish words I don't understand)...wah wah lesbian (Turkish word I do understand) wah wah wah..."
Me: (holding my sides as I belly laugh)
Yasemin (8): "Wada, what does lesbian mean?"
Me: (without missing a beat) "A girl who has a girlfriend"
Selin (11): "What do you call a boy with a boyfriend?"
Me: "Gay"
Selin: "Turkce ne demek?" (how do you say it in Turkish?)
Me: "Ayni" (the same)
Gay=Eşcinsel
ReplyDeleteLezbiyen=Sevici
I've sometimes had trouble with teaching/using the word "guy" with low-level students, because Turks often pronounce "gay" as it would be phonetically in Turkish, which is "guy." A whole elementary class was getting progressively more pissed off at me one day, and I finally asked why and one of them sputtered, "Because you keep calling us 'gays' (I was calling them 'guys')."
ReplyDeleteHaha, Stranger...there are so many times when some word that sounds like another one shocks the two girls I am teaching (ie frock, ah ha!, and of course peach)
ReplyDeleteAnd anonymous...that is nice. But the Turkish people I know always use "gay" and "lesbian" so as far as I am concerned it's "ayni". No use taking the long way when a short cut works just as well for my purposes...but that's just my opinion.