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Two Dots Too Many

April 22, 2008 @ 12:41 am * Filed by Bill Poser under Writing systems

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The Turkish newspaper Hurriyet reports a tragic consequence of the
failure to localize cell phones.

Ramazan Calcoban sent his estranged wife Emine the text message:

    Zaten sen sikisinca konuyu degistiriyorsun.

"Anyhow, whenever you can't answer an argument, you change the
subject."

Unfortunately, what she thought he wrote was:

    Zaten sen sikisince konuyu degistiriyorsun.

"Anyhow, whenever they are fucking you, you change the subject."

She showed the message to her father, who angrily called Ramazan and
accused him of calling his daughter a prostitute. Ramazan went to his
wife's home to apologize, only to be attacked by his wife, her
father, and two sisters. He was stabbed in the chest but succeeded in
grabbing a knife, stabbing his wife, and getting away. Emine died of
her wounds; Ramazan killed himself in jail.

How exactly did this tragedy come about? Turkish has four high
vowels, front unrounded /i/, written <i>, front rounded /y/, written
<u>, back unrounded /i/, written <i>, and back rounded /u/, written
<u>. The verb form that Ramazan wrote was sikisinca, which is a
gerund of sikismak, literally "to get wedged, to get in a tight
spot", but here with the sense of "to be unable to answer an
argument". What his wife thought he wrote was sikisince, the
corresponding form of sikismek "to fuck". The verb stems sikis "to
get wedged" and sikis "to fuck" differ only in the backness of their
vowels, which is reflected graphically in the presence or absence of
a dot. The problem was that Emine's cell phone was not localized
properly for Turkish and did not have the letter <i>; when it
displayed Ramazan's message, it replaced the <i>s with <i>s.

To see exactly how the misinterpretation arose, it may help to
understand the structure of the Turkish sentences involved. zaten
means "anyhow" and sen "you". konuyu is the definite accusative of
konu "subject", which tells us that it is the object of the following
verb. degistiriyorsun is the second person singular subject form of
degistirmek "to change" in the present tense, meaning "you change".
As you can see, the verb comes at the end of its clause, following
the object. Only one verb, the second one, is marked for its subject:
the suffix sun tells us that the subject of "change" is "you". The
verb of the first clause is unmarked for subject.

If you have compared carefully what Ramazan sent and what Emine
received, you may have noticed that Emine and her father should have
had a clue as to what Ramazan meant in spite of the replacement of
<i> by <i>. When you replace the <i>s of sikisinca with <i>s as the
cellphone did, the result is not sikisince   "on fucking" but
sikisinca. This is incorrect because it fails to conform to the rules
of vowel harmony. In Turkish, most suffixal high vowels must agree
with the preceding vowel in frontness and rounding, and most suffixal
non-high vowels must agree with the preceding vowel in frontness. You
can see this in the two forms of the infinitive suffix: mek after
front vowels and mak after back vowels.

The gerund suffix used here has four forms: ince, used after front
unrounded vowels, as in gelince "on coming", unce, used after front
rounded vowels, as in gorunce "on seeing", inca, used after back
unrounded vowels, as in alinca "on taking", and unca, used after back
rounded vowels, as in yorunca "on tiring". The final <a> of the word
sikisinca that Emine received should have served as a clue that the
preceding vowels were intended to be back, not front.

There are several lessons to take away from this tragedy. One is that
localization is a good thing. Another is that it is best not to kill
people who make you angry until you have carefully investigated the
situation, if then. But as a phonologist and student of harmony
systems, I have to see this as a compelling argument for paying
attention to vowel harmony.

Hat tip to Mike Speriosu.

April 22, 2008 @ 12:41 am * Filed by Bill Poser under Writing systems

Permalink

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7 Comments

 1. John Cowan said,

    April 22, 2008 @ 2:10 am

    A more modest application of vowel harmony is going to my
    favorite Turkish restaurant, reading the menu (which is
    ASCII-only) and figuring out which tokens of i, o, and u are
    properly i, o, and u respectively. Unfortunately, I know no way
    to reconstruct c, g, or s correctly without actually knowing
    Turkish, so I can't order in Turkish without sounding like a
    Greek.

 2. Aidan Kehoe said,

    April 22, 2008 @ 7:18 am

    It's entirely possible to send <i>  by means of text message,
    but it halves the number of characters per message, cf. http://
    en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Short_message_service#GSM . The technical
    meat of it is that the 7-bit GSM alphabet was designed for
    Western European, and anyone whose needs aren't served by it must
    use UTF-16. There's been a media ruckus in Spain recently about
    this--at least ten years after the technology was deployed(!)--see
    http://www.lavanguardia.es/lv24h/20080415/53455491730.html .
    Though from my experience the missing letters (aiou) are hardly
    used by the average Spaniard in email or chat anyway.

 3. Sniffnoy said,

    April 22, 2008 @ 2:31 pm

    Halves the number of characters per message? Haven't they ever
    heard of UTF-8? I mean, it's not going to be compatible with the
    GSM alphabet, but neither is UTF-16 or anything else, so that
    seems a bit silly.

 4. Aidan Kehoe said,

    April 22, 2008 @ 3:40 pm

    Sniffnoy, one of the assumptions implicit in many of the
    advantages of UTF-8 is that each letter is encoded using one
    octet. That is not the case with the GSM encoding. Normally,
    after the first seven bits have been received, you start the
    second character (though there are a few variable-length
    characters).

    Also, the final draft of the relevant GSM standard dates from
    1995, at which point very few people outside of Bell Labs were
    implementing UTF-8, despite the 1993 Usenix presentation. The
    design of the standard was not particularly astonishing in that
    context.

 5. Sniffnoy said,

    April 22, 2008 @ 7:23 pm

    Oh, huh, when I saw "7-bit" I figured that just meant in the same
    way ASCII is 7-bit.

 6. outeast said,

    April 23, 2008 @ 4:28 am

    That's very interesting to me, Aidan: it helps explain an issue
    that has long puzzled me, which is that when I type SMS messages
    in Czech (using predictive text with diacritics) the character
    allowance is always very short. So thank you!

 7. Feriha said,

    April 23, 2008 @ 3:35 pm

    Hello,
    Well, actually I have nothing to do with languages .I am from
    Turkey, and was searching in the Internet about our newest tragic
    and weird incident
    Then I clicked here because I thought this is a new foreign entry
    about fanatically, pathologically sexually obsessed people who
    can kill each other at every inconceivable and ridiculous
    incident.
    Then I read this serious article about vowels etc.
    :)))
    I really enjoyed it. I wasn't expecting it, though.
    Thanks .

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