aurguplu

i am posting this on the eve of the elections which swept the AKP into power and put an end to almost all of the politicians active since the 1970s. although this election was about getting rid of the likes of ecevit, yılmaz, çiller etc., which everyone wanted, few people anticipated that there would be such a landslide victory for AKP (everyone knew, though, that it was going to be the clear winner). the recent statement by the german foreign minister joschka fischer (no turkey in eu) also contributed little to anyone's efforts other than that of the islamists. what's gonna happen now? akp has come to power as a single party, an outcome so far favourably received by the financial markets, as it may mean stability. everyone hopes here that akp will have learnt its lessons from past experiences (28th feb) that a brush with the army is not advisable. but then again, the army in turn must have learnt its own lesson, i.e. you cannot rule a country despite its people. rpp (baykal) must have realised that his party got what it got thanks to kemal derviş and not him, and in fact, if he weren't heading the party, it could have got a good deal more. the recent snub by the german foreign minister in the usa (no turkey in eu) must have contributed to akp's success to a certain extent, and this may indeed be regarded as the first occasion where the turkish people made a conscious choice which signals its loss of hope of ever joining the eu. the coming decade may well see a turkey which reinvents itself as a moderately islamic country with a tinge of westernisation and a strong position in the islamic world rather than a pariah desperately trying to join the eu and seeing its dignity dragged through the mud every time. a chinese curse runs: "may you live in interesting times". looks like some chinese cursed us.

tb, why don't you just post your comments separately without reference to mine, as the two have nothing to do with one another?

hovsep, i agree with you that the pm of a country in a volatile region like ours has to choose his words carefully, and that özal didn't. he dropped so many bricks that he made the chief of staff resign over the iraq issue back in 1990 (91?). i don't know about the ecevit statement. if he said this to people from the east (kars etc) you may as well discount it: everyone there wants the borders to open so that trade may be done. in fact, that trade is actually taking place, but through georgia, and it is the georgians who are getting rich off turks' and armenians' backs. if we could solve our problems we could have direct trade and that in turn would eliminate any "danger" we may pose to one another: you don't want to harm a country you are trading with. you can ignore an ecevit statement because like all politicians he is notoriously unreliable. if that statement was uttered near election time, it was worthless. i suggest you watch the new government (whatever that's gonna be) for these new moves. it could be a distinct possibility if someone like cem made it to the government, but that seems very unlikely now, as kemal derviş treacherously dropped him (the only time he got a negative point from me, and a VERY negative one at that). if the roa gave a clear message that they didn't have land claims from turkey and wouldn't back any by third parties, turkey would sooner or later be forced to recognise the ag, and not necessarily through external, but internal pressure: turks are getting sick of having their feet tied today because of things that happened before almost the entire current population was even born. we had (smaller) such problems with greece, mainly over the aegean and cyprus, but secondarily over the thracian turks and anatolian greeks, and they are being solved now (cyprus may remain thorny for a while), and both sides see what a waste of time it has been. neither the armenians nor the turks can unfortunately see what common benefits they can enjoy if they could put their egos in their pockets and look at the map with a calm head. [ November 01, 2002, 07:40 AM: Message edited by: aurguplu ]

to everyone i was made to act as the guinea pig of a friend's, and was out of order for a week (and will be for another one). therefore these late replies. hagarag, i understand your points re empires being no more, but we are not one either: we have two major nations (turks and kurds) and a few smaller ones (greeks, armenians, jews, arabs, assyrians, lazes etc). of the 70 million people in turkey, 50-55 million speak turkish, most of the rest kurdish (with 500,000-1,000,000 arabic speakers). we are a predominantly turkic country. as far as both our geographical and demographical features go, if we are an empire, then much of the rest of the world still is. and sorry, whoever wants a chunk of our land has to remove us from there first. and by all accounts, this has been a pretty tough job throughout history for anyone who tried it. hovsep, özal was known as a brick-dropper. he is known to have said things that have ruffled everyone's feathers, including the azeris (he is known to have commented once on any fears of turkey doing anything pan-turkic with azerbaijan: "we are sunni, they are shia"). so i can imagine that in yet another özal gem, he might have blurted out something of this kind (or been misquoted and then not corrected it). if he did, well, i guess he is paying for it over the other side now. cheers,

steve, the thing is microsoft word has the symbols under insert/symbols, but the damn things don't make it to the text over the internet (or maybe being an electronic neanderthal, i can't). cheers,

quote:Originally posted by HOVSEP KASHISHIAN:The Turkish authority said that if the United States atack Irak and if the Kurds declare an indipendent state Turky knows how to deal with it , i hope another " Genocide " is not on their mind this time against the Kurds , you know Turky is making the decision who can have a state and who cant have one . hovsep, the turkish authorities are just sabre rattling. if the usa has decided that there be a kurdish state, there is precious little turkey can do about it. if the kurds don't make the expected mistake of overlooking/oppressing the turkmens, the two states may even cooperate once the fact of its existence sinks in. i understand many armenians had feared that if armenia had declared independence from the soviet union and the russians had accepted it, the next day the turkish army would be parading in yerevan (i think it was mj who had posted something of the sort). well, it's a good ten years since you got your ndependence, and our army has not been anywhere near yerevan, has it? in this country we are now trying to get rid of our fears. maybe you could do the same. we are not out there to "finish any job we had staerted in 1915". 1915 is an unfortunate page in our history and if it hadn't happened we all would be so much better off.

quote:Originally posted by hagarag:Turkish military junta is already planning elimination of the Kurds to complete the job that began with elimination of the Armenians, Anatolian Greeks, and Assyrians/Chaldeans. To paraphrase Ozal, Turkey will teach the Kurds "the lesson of 1915." hagarag, trust me, 1) there is no turkish military junta now: there is a national security council, like in all countries, but much stronger than in other countries, but they haven't come there with a coup, they were always there. 2) that "junta" is not planning anything of the sort: up to 1/4 to 1/3 of the turkish population is kurdish, a sizeable part of the army is kurdish, some high-ranking generals are/were kurdish, and the kurdish reality is an obvious reality. anything like deportation, genocide etc. is just not feasible, so even to think about it is a waste of time. right now the country is moving towards a binational stage even though this is not formally admitted. 3) it would be very strange for özal to say something like that as he was a kurd himself by his own declaration) and had an armenian grandmother (by many reliable accounts). he was by far and away the most liberal leader we had and if i can type on an armenian forum and get away with it residing in this country, i owe that to him before anyone else. can you please tell me where you got your quote from? cheers,

quote:Originally posted by HOVSEP KASHISHIAN:Aurguplu , let me give you an aidia how to change: First , you have to get raid of your " Rulling Army Junta " But then you will tell me that the " Islamist " will take over , and we Armenians will have an " Islamist " governed turky on our western border , my question is , is that good or bad for the armenians , so we have to choose the less evil which i think will be the " Junta ", but then again that means there is no change , Aurguplu , how many Turks think like you hundreds , thousnds , milions , and how long we have to wait my father is a Survivor of the Genocide he is 94 and i am 59 do you think that Turky is going to change in my life time . hovsep (if i may call you by your first name), i understand the armenian indignation at the genocide not being recognised nearly nine decades after it took place. the thing is that maybe for the first time since 1915, that stance is being questioned by a growing number of turks, and it is not a riskless job. we want to have it recognised because 1) like all nations we have ugly facts in our past, and won't get beyond them unless we recognise them, 2) it is injustice not to recognise a crime, and 3) we are really making a tilt of ourselves by forever advancing arguments on whether it was a genocide or not when the armenian population dropped from 1.3 m (official ottoman figure) in 1914 to some 70,000 today. but i grew up at a time when you could spend a pretty unpleasant time at horror palace (prison) just for mentioning the word "kurd". anything armenian was strictly taboo for turks until özal. it is only now that things are thawing, but it takes time. and it won't just "happen". we (=turks)have to do some pushing, and i for one am doing. as for the junta and islamists: well, we are the only muslim nation that has anything remotely resembling a democracy, and we have achieved this by making life very difficult for islam in general and political islam in particular. we can get very democratic and turn into an iran. no thanks. and as far as the junta is concerned, they are easing their grip on the political life a bit. forty years ago they hanged the first democratically elected prime minister. in 1971, they just removed him. in 1980, they removed him and put him out of politics until 1987. the guys came back in 1987, and until 1997 there was no military. on 28th feb 1997, they caused the resignation of the government (headed by the islamic erbakan) by expressing their discontent with it. these days, they just ban people by using some articles of the constitution (which admittedly they wrote themselves). the recent laws concerning kurdish, death penalty, minority foundations all passed under soldiers' supervision: we don't have a ditatorship, we have a "guided democracy" and as a citizen living in this country i think it is the lesser of the two evils (the other one being political islam). if they were as bad as they were portrayed by the west, they would have stayed in power once they came in. they didn't. why?

quote:Originally posted by nairi: quote:Originally posted by aurguplu:the thing is i have several western works on things armenian, where aghtamar is spelt altamar (in some with l slashed, in other with l with a dot underneath). to the best of my knowledge, l slashed is used to transliterate "dark l" in linguistics, which is a like the l in "fall" rather than the l in "flew" (british pronunciation). It's always hard to tell how people used to pronounce words 800 years ago, especially if there are no recordings. Guesses are that many Armenian words that now have a clear /l/, uvular /r/ or /x/, used to have a voiceless /l/, as in the Welsh "ll". Whether this is true or not, no one should be surprised that transcriptions of words such as Akhtamar are very varied today (especially if we take idiolects and allophones into account).that's true, and is always a hotbed of debate among historical linguists of any language. some evidence can be derived from poetry (where things that don't rhyme today rhymed a thousand years ago, in fact, the chinese were among the first to note this, and realised that language was subject to change). frankly, we probably need a grabar/krapart specialist to sort us out in this matter.

quote:Originally posted by Twilight Bark: quote:Originally posted by aurguplu: for instance, kurtuluş means "salvation" in turkish, and the accent is on the last syllable, but kurtuluş with the accent on the first syllable is the name of the quarter where a number of armenian families still live. taksim with stress on last syllable means "division, allotment", taksim with stress on the first is the name of the taksim square in istanbul. I understand the point about shifting the stress (as a practical means to distinguish between the ordinary usage of the word and as a proper noun). That would be necessitated by daily life in a city. However, can you provide similar examples where mountain names are involved? I am not asking rhetorically.tb, the only mountain name that comes to my mind that has the stress on the second syllable is süphan dağı (your sipan), and i think that is either because it has only two syllables (but then again, both agri and toros, both stressed on the first syllable, have two syllables), or because süphan is a koranic word (subhan with long a). of course, the transition from sipan to süphan probably took place during the republican period, and i would very much like to know how the locals (who are probably kurdish) call the mountain. as a rule (of which i do not really know any exceptions other than süphan dağı) place names are never stressed on the last syllable. in fact, this rule is in turkish grammar books (but then again, i take certain "rules" in these books with a huge grain of salt). i have no evidence in favour or to the contrary whether that would be necessitated by life in the city. one should really consult a work turkish dialectology, and these are improving in time (meaning that many works composed earlier, which recorded dialects that are on the verge of dying out thanks to television and radio, are not that properly recorded: they were usually decent at recording phonemes (sounds), but info re the accents leave much to be desired). so i am afraid i have no very clear answer to your question. but i can say that as a native speaker of turkish, a place-name stressed on the last syllable sounds very un-turkish to me. we even shift the stress to the penultimate in foreign place names where it would be on the ultimate, like paris.

steve, tb, the overwhelming majority of mountain names in turkey (as well as other place names) are non-turkic in origin, but have acquired a turkic-looking garb in pronunciation and spelling terms over the centuries. it would be abit fuile to look for a turkish origin of an armenian name for a mountain that has been their symbol for three thousand years. the name of the mountain is either armenian or kurdish (or urartian or georgian), but i would be very surprised to learn it to be turkish. or, maybe "agri" is a recent name, and until comparatively recently, it was called by another name. i don't know. cheers,

tb, re the accent: in turkish, accent is one of stress, and it usually falls on the last syllable, especially of nouns. but place-names never have accent on the last syllable, there the syllable typically moves to the penultimate position (if it is on the antepenultimate, then you have reason to doubt the word's turkish origin). for instance, kurtuluş means "salvation" in turkish, and the accent is on the last syllable, but kurtuluş with the accent on the first syllable is the name of the quarter where a number of armenian families still live. taksim with stress on last syllable means "division, allotment", taksim with stress on the first is the name of the taksim square in istanbul. steve, slashed l represents a "w"-like sound in polish which originally developed from the slavic dark "l". it is also used to transliterate the russian and turkish dark l (like in russian ja padal (i fell) or turkish aldım (i took)). to the best of my knowledge it is also used in IPA and the north american transliteration systems. if it is used to transcribe some other sound in armenian, which may of course be, then this is completely independent from its normally accepted international usage to transliterate dark l. (mind you, "gh", kh" etc, might also have evolved from dark l, which is entirely possible and documented in a number of cases).

re orenag/örnek: i think the following is plausible to some degree: since orenag can be derived from an armenian root, and örnek from a turkish one, it might be that there were originally two independent words, the armenian orenag and the turkish örnek. the meanings appear to have been slightly different, if "orenag" originally meant something like "rule" and "örnek" originally mean something like "textile pattern" the meanings were vaguely alike, and people bilingual in turkish/armenian started to use them interchangeably. örnek is found as far east as kazakh and uighur, and means textile pattern there (something woven), and it has a perfectly fitting turkish etymology (ör-enek). i find it a bit hard to conceive that the kazakhs would import an armenian word for an activity that they had pursued for millennia (weaving) which looked just like the word they would have coined from a turkic root if they had cared to! i think the two different origins and then parallel existence theory is the least implausible: there are a few such instances between unrelated languages that had lived side by side.

PS. I also have access to many Turkic Altaic words that have derived from the Arm. "yegh". Some of them may not be readily recognizable such as the Altai "yu'", Kirghiz "jau", Yakut "aga" etc. arpa, how on earth do you derive kirghiz altai and yakut (for god's sake, yakut!) word (and one a basic part of the vocabulary) from an armenian word? have the armenians ever been east of the caspian in any numbers, and why would these guys use an armenian word for "fat" (that's what it originally meant: anything lipid) when they had plenty of fat around them in the form of sheep? besides, i expect your comments on the eurasiatic/nostratic stuff i had posted earlier on. cheers,

tigrannesiii, i forgot to add: there are references to the killings being part o a genocidal plan in the turkish literature of, or concerning, the period, written as memoirs (one example i can come up with is the "zeytindağı" (mount of olives) of falih rıfkı atay). as far as i know there is quite some evidence in such works written by turks that the state was behind the killings one way or the other. take care,

As to the Turkish "yagh"; "The (Arm.)colloquial "yegh" has found its way into many other languages, most particularly into the Tatar dialects. There is a rule in the Tatar languages that the "e" sound must not precede a consonant, so the "e" was modified into an "a", hence the Turkish "yagh" from the original Armenain "yegh". arpa, i happen to know some tatar (both crimean and kazan) and there is no such rule there. "e" sometimes changes to "i" but 1) this is recent, and 2) it has not got something to do with consonants in general. what do you mean by "tatar languages" by the way? there are only two extant ( crimean and kazan) and one extinct (kuman), and they are part of the kipchak group of turkic languages, together with bashkir, kazakh, karaim, karachay-malkar and nogai. ours (turkish) is oghuz, together with azeri, kashgai, khorasan turkish, and turkmen. the two groups separated about 1,000-1,500 years ago. cheers,

arpa, during the linguistic purges of atatürk it was the arabic and persian vocabulary that was the main target. the "primitive sound" kh does not occur in istanbul turkish, the basis of our official idiom. it is there in inner and eastern anatolian dialects, which always had had a low status anyway. there was a letter denoting "kh" in the ottoman script, which was used to render the arabic "kh" and the persian and turkish "kh" IN WRITING. these were pronounced as "h" as istanbul turks deem the "kh" sound as gross. "kh" probably fell from istanbul pronunciation by the 18th century (as contemporary european renderings of urkish pronunciation of the time, and evidence from poetry, indicate). we lost two sounds thanks to the language reform, the closed "e" (the "e" between dark "e" and "i", and the barred "i" (the "i" between "i" and "ı"), but that is more because of these anatolians having little notion of linguistic niceties rather than any concerted action on the part of the government. and i think the "mountain of pain" was a joke and not a theory ever held seriously by anyone. cheers,

quote:Originally posted by TigrannesIII:Ali, Armenians call themselves 'Hye' coming from the name Haig, the father of Armenia. Does that help? We were calling ourselves 'hye' long before the emergence of Turkic tribes in Central Asia, just in case you're trying to draw some similarities or what not. Could you please tell me what factors led you to accept the Genocide? I need to do some educating this weekend. 1. i know the above explanation re the origin of "hay", also, another explanation that finds favour with the archaeologists/specialists of ancient languages is that it derives from something like "hayk'" (can't get the exact transliteration on this keyboard) meaning "hittite". this is quite possible, as the greeks in byzantine times were calling themselves "romaika" after the roman empire, and anatolian turks were calling themselves "rum" after the same empire. if the armenians ever were in a confederation where the hittites were the bosses, then they could have been called by the same name as well. i understand "hayasa-", "hayk" and a few other versions are pretty old. 2. what factors led me to accept the genocide: a) my family has played a role in turkish affairs for quite a while now, including before, during and after 1915, and i was exposed to "alternative" versions of history very early on. the wet nurse of a member of our family had lost two sons in the "kıyım", as a senior member of my family had told me. c) a member of my family, when he was a teenager, had had to travel from some place in anatolia to istanbul (or was it vice versa?) in 1915-1916. their cart was stopped by the chetes en route and all males ordered to get out. they were then told that no turkish adult male shall pass that gorge without first killing an armenian. that member of my family was about 12 at the time, so he was saved. several others were not that lucky: they were taken behind the hill and some time later two shots were heard. then they were sent back to the cart and the cart was allowed to continue. one of these unlucky ones was a senior member of the CUP and a party ideologue. he did not open his mouth all the way to their destination. d) my (english) arabic tutor at oxford, whom i have always been very fond of, used to make jokes about the armenian genocide with other tutors in front of me saying things like "when the germans organised it for them". a, b, and c are confirmations of killings rather than the genocide. many turkish families have similar stories to tell, and the killings themselves have never really been denied. what was denied was that the whole thing was a state-engineered attempt to specifically eliminate, or drastically reduce the armenian nation in turkey. d was an eye opener, and it led me to read a bit more on it while abroad (those days it wasn't advisable to nose about asking for things armenian in turkey), and of course, several salient facts emerged: i) there were some 18 million people in anatolia in 1914, some 1.3 million of which (by our own account) were armenian. after the war, there were 12 million people in anatolia, some 70,000 of which were armenian. looks like something pretty bad has happened to the armenians, doesn't it? ii) the turkish parliamentary archives were then closed from 1915 onwards. if you had something to hide about the foundation of the republic, 1919 at the earliest would be a more likely date. why 1915? iii) armenians in turkish history books make a brief appearance in WWI, when they betray us in favour of the russians, kill us, and then disappear. no word before, no word after. a bit enigmatic. makes you ask for more info. iv) i don't know how early i acquired it, but like most turks, i knew from very early on that "something very bad" had gone on between the turks and the armenians, and therefore the two peoples had an invisible wall between them. even turkish children as young as six are to some degree aware of this "something very bad". well, how i came to accept the genocide. i had had to accept a number of ugly facts in life, some about people i knew, others about my nation, others about other things. i have a tendency to stop as soon as i realise that whatever intellectual exercise that i am doing is self-deception/wishful thinking etc. you had 18 m people, 1.3 m of whom were armenian. today you have 70 m people, 70,000 of whom are armenian. if you put it this blunt, i.e. call a spade a spade, you can't ecsape the conclusion that it was a genocide. of course you cannot "prove" or "disprove" that it was a genocide, as authenticated first hand documents are not there (the archives of the CUP are lost and orders at any rate were very probably oral). but there comes a point when you realise that the genocide explanation is far more plausible and simpler than anything that the establishment makes up. i can tell from my own experience that the best way to make a turk accept the fact is to make expose him to three versions of the story (armenian, turkish, third party: german is best). the more you try to force it upon them, the more they will feel compelled to deny because he will feel that he personally is being charged. another factor is the land claims business. the main reason why turkey keeps denying the whole thing is the land claims, and as long as the persist (or are tied to the genocide claims) the future of the issue is bleak. the overwhelming majority of turks have no doubt whatsoever that the genocide claims are just a scam to take half of turkey away, and then the kurds will come along, then the greeks, and it will be sevres. it is extremely important to understand this, as many turks don't just make this up as a way to evade the genocide issue, but genuinely believe it, and let's face it, the armenian side habitually ties one issue to the other. if you got some educating to do, perhaps the best advice i can give you is always to keep in mind that the other side really believes what he says. don't say something like he is lying, but rather that he has got his facts wrong. put the facts before him and then ask him what he thinks happened. i had put my facts before him and arrived at the genocide conclusion on my own.

quote:Originally posted by TigrannesIII:Ali, Silk Road. That's all I can think of. It could have worked both ways, too. tigrannesiii, yes, this is very possible. the silk road was in place by roman times and in all probability before that, and the flow of goods and ideas was not always one-way: the greek meander motif made its way into china in the centuries b.c., and the romans are known to have had factories and other installations as far east as malaysia. let me tell you of a rather curious discovery that was made in aegean turkey about one or two decades ago: the ancient greek ruins that dot the place are full of various ornaments in the forms of swirls, meanders etc. the dresses of the turkmen nomads that abound there are also full of different but visibly similar ornaments. of course, when the similarity was discovered, it was naturally supposed that the turks who had come later, had borrowed the ornaments to be seen on the greek monuments that were exposed above the ground here and there. then it was discovered that the same motifs were found further east in anatolia, and even further east in azerbaijan and as far as turkmenistan. no large scale eastward movement of turks after their arrival into anatolia is known, and people were puzzled quite a bit. then of course, the mystery was solved: the bactrian greeks! they had penetrated as far east as afghanistan, and established cities there (there is a place in afghanistan, ay khanoum (a turkish name as you can see) which has been dug out, and is a greek site). they of course took the motifs they found there and left quite a bit of theirs there as well. when the turks came in a few hundred years later (we hadn't yet permanently settled there until a bit later), they took some of those motifs, and of course some of those turks made for anatolia a few centuries later, and today you have two very different interpretations of the same set of motifs side by side! history is fascinating.

arpa, i wasn't asking if aghtamar was the armenianised version of any turkish "al tamar= red vein". in fact, if some turk had told me of such a connection i would probably leave my mouth alone and laugh with some other part of my body. the thing is i have several western works on things armenian, where aghtamar is spelt altamar (in some with l slashed, in other with l with a dot underneath). to the best of my knowledge, l slashed is used to transliterate "dark l" in linguistics, which is a like the l in "fall" rather than the l in "flew" (british pronunciation). i may conjecture here a wild guess that if the original spelling was altamar rather than aghtamar, then the legend "akh tamara" might have been coined later on to explain the name (eponymous), but to attempt to find a turkish explanation for aghtamar as from al tamar would be a bit like finding a turkish "etymology" for niagara (the turkish "etymology" that was found was "ne yaygara". i don't know whether this was intended as a joke even then, but some turkish "etymologies" are almost as funny). anyway, in brief, it has never occurred to me that aghtamar/altamar could ever have a turkic etymology.

gamavor, i have come to the conclusion that no dialogue can be established with you. i have decided to stop replying to your comments to save time & nerves, maybe it would be a good idea for you to do the same. just ignore my postings, as i ignore yours. i shall continue to converse with other members. hovsep, i agree with your points, but 1) things are improving, albeit slowly and only with outside push, and 2) we won't get anywhere without trying. accept the facts as they are and don't do anything about it, we'll be in the same sh*t we have been for the past ninety years. [ October 21, 2002, 09:15 AM: Message edited by: aurguplu ]

something else came to my mind: years ago i had sleepless nights and cold sweats when i discovered that the armenians called themselves "hye", as the oghuz tribe to which the ottomans belonged (and to which i also belong on my mother's side) is called "kayı" (approximately pronounced "quh-yeh"). "kayı" is reported to mean "strong" in turkish (it is a hapax legomenon as far as i know). what in your knowledge does "hye" mean? cheers,

arpa, by the way, some roots common to turkic and armenian may in fact be common to indo-european (of which armo is a member) and turkic, in a greater linguistic phylum called "eurasiatic" or (in a slightly different version) "nostratic". the two theories, both quite similar actually, maintain that indo-european, uralic, altaic, korean, japanese, the paleosiberian languages and eskimo-aleut are genetically very distantly related. the eurasiatic version is defended in stanford linguist joseph greenberg's "the eurasiatic language family" (the book is available from barnes and noble) and the nostratic by a few russian scholars. both also maintain that kartvelian (south caucasian) and afroasiatic (hamito-semitic) are also related to this group, but perhaps at a greater remove. i myself had discovered a number of turkic roots very similar to indo-european which could not be explained away as borrowings or chance resemblances. i was encouraged to see that some serious scholars also entertain the possibility. i am planning to return to academia in one or two years' time, and do research on the subject. meanwhile i leave you with the nightmare of the possibility that we may - linguistically at least - be very, very distant cousins indeed (about 8,000-12,000 years ago). good night sleep tight have nice dreams.

arpa, so we shall change your surname to "çekiştiricibaşıyan (american spelling, if they can: chekishtiridjibashian)"? my god, this has been a long one: agglutinative language! what will you do with such a surname in the usa, where they shorten everything down to one or two syllables? "chekian"? cheers,

arpa, thanks for the poem (if you can say thanks for such a poem, being ali son of a turk). you know that i never denied there have been many ali's sons of turks who have done things that make humans worthy of the name feel their flesh creep and many ali's - turks or non-turks - ashamed and indignant. so what are you going to do if one day you have the pala and we have the scissors? pay in kind? i am one of those few out here trying to put an end to this cycle of hatred, and my own folks are not helping me much (an understatement), because they know full well that this will necessitate a "revision" of history and appropriate action (starting with admission and apology). the only card that i have - and that i keep overplaying - is that if and when we own up to past crimes and approach in peace, we are going to be received in kind. all they have to do to blow me away is to link me to this poem of yours (and it is not the only one we both know, i have been pretty much everywhere on this website and elsewhere as well) to at least convince others (less naive ones) that we are hereditary enemies and there will be no peace till doomsday (and not even after we accept the genocide, apologise, and make reparations). so what do you think i should do? drop dead? give up? accept that we are never going to resolve this conflict and future generations who were not even born then will ever keep fighting about it? peace cannot be achieved if one extends his hand and the other fails to shake it. my hand keeps staying in the air. very depressing... maybe hating us has become part of your identity: "i am born, i am armenian, i hate the turks". you have other, beautiful things in your culture, and your history neither starts with 1071 or 1915 nor ends there. think about it.