Apparu!

A fiery love that crashed and sunk makes for an effective plot of this bombshell production. Multilingual artists, stars of the Central Asian musical market, Mirbek Atabekov, Kämşat Joldybaeva impersonate the partners in this love affair, amplifying it in the unswerving Kazakh. The combination is a perfect match for ourTurkic Lyrics.

Kazakh is a Kipchak language, so accordinly there are some things that we already knew ahead of meeting it in this song. The Turkish palatal approximant y (IPA [j]) is the stronger Kazakh palatal fricative j (IPA [ʑ]). We excpeted there to be the uvular stop q. However this did not help us at all to pin down what Mirbek and Kamshat sang about. Quite predictably as with most Turkic language there were some Arabisms that stood out: • махаббат – Turkish muhabbet, әлем – Turkish alem. Again, muhabbet means ‘conversation’ in Turkish, but ‘love’ in any other Turkic language as it does in Arabic.

The grammar can be easily parsed, however the vocabulary, although from the sma stock, has a different phonetic makeup, it cannot be deciphered by an untrained ear. Besides, Kazakh is much more complicated in terms of sounds, which, as a side note, created this ongoing debackle about creating a Latin script for the language, there are so many versions and they keep changing officially.

• kk. sezım ‘feeling’ – tr. sezim ‘detection’ (diverged)
• kk. tarttyq ‘we went down’ – tr. tarttık ‘we weighed’ (diverged)
• kk. üzıldı ‘broke’ – tr. üzüldü ‘got upset’ (the Kazakh meaning is actually more Turkic so to say)
• kk. süi– ‘to love’ – tr. sev– (you would never guess)
• kk. tözım ‘patience’ – Turkish uses an Arabic word ‘sabır’ instead. Speakers of Chuvash, by the way, can hear some of Kazakh words perfectly, like this one, which is identical to Chuvash tüsĕm.
• kk. tyŋda– ‘to listen’ – tr. dinle– ‘to listen’. This word is in the title of the song, but what a staggering correspondenc of sounds. You would never guess, but yes in Kazakh a lot of time lateral l [l] is fortified into an obstruent [d] instead.
• kk. edı ‘there was’ – tr. idi ‘there was’. (quite recognizable)
• kk. şaqyrdyq ‘we called’ – tr. çağırdık ‘we called’. (Kazakh doesn’t really have an affricate [tɕ], which is counterintuitive to most Turkic languages)
• kk. özge ‘other’ – tr. özge ‘different’. This is not a commonly used word in Turkish. But while researching it appeared to be a cognate of Chuvash ‘urăh‘, you would never guess that.
• kk. Es–aqyl ‘mind’ – another word that can be easily picked up by Chuvash (ăs-hakăl), but is not common way of saying it in Turkish.
• kk. aspan ‘heaven’ – Kazakh has a fair share of its Persian loans, which may be surprising to Turks, as we are superficially made to believe that it is Turkish that had so many of them there had to be a reform. In reality most Turkic languages have Persian loans, and many of them.
• kk. tağdyr ‘fate’ – tr. takdir ‘providence’ (you woul never guess).

Kazakh is one of the major Turkic languages, and is quite rich in expression. Some aspects of it are predicatble, however it is quite surprising when looked at closely.

Did you know you can watch the videos here before their actual premier in Youtube? How great is that?