Polytropy

Although the word telezzüz is absent from one Turkish dictionary (Arkadaş Türkçe Sözlük, 2004), I find it in a couple of Turkish-English dictionaries. Its length recalls Ottoman times, when Turkish speakers freely borrowed from Persian and Arabic.

Native Turkish words can be extended to great length with grammatical endings, as in gelemeyebilirim. I once heard a taxi driver say that to a colleague who was making tea. He was saying literally, “I am able to be unable to come”; he meant, “Maybe I can’t come have tea, because I’ve got to take this guy out to the airport.” The single word for all of that was built up from the single syllable gel- “come” by addition of -eme- “be unable,” -y- (buffer), -ebil- “be able,” -ir- (marking an aorist verb), and -im “I.” By contrast, telezzüz has no such analysis, at least not in Turkish. This brands the word as foreign, at least to my understanding, the way sesquipedality in an English word connotes a borrowing from Latin or Greek.

As I have just learned, the word telezzüz is used as the name of an upscale vegetarian restaurant, over on the Asian side of Istanbul, near an Ottoman kiosk that my wife and I have visited. Perhaps one day we will dine at the restaurant, for a taste of luxury, the way we dined at Nicole, in European Istanbul, almost nine years ago. Unfortunately, for us at least, that restaurant wasn’t vegetarian.

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