Everything Is Qəşəng When You Listen to the D-O-G

This song (which I have as a ring tone on my phone now) is an example of how qəşəng has been used in pop culture here.  The other day I heard this song blasting from three different cars in 45 seconds.  I highly encourage you to make it your ring tone and spread the qəşəng.

"Qəşəng" (or without special characters: "Qesheng") is an adjective that means "nice," "fine," "beautiful," or "cute" and can be used to describe everything from a new pair of shoes to a person, car, suit, or kitchen remodel.  And if you think  something (or someone) is especially qəşəng, you can emphasize the qəşəng-ness by saying "qəşəng-qəşəng."

It's one of the first Azərbaycani words that many Peace Corps Volunteers here adopted into common usage (whether we were speaking Azərbaycani or not), and in the English/American tradition of being playful with language, we have gone further and taken to using this adjective as a verb, as in the sentence above, and other parts of speech.*  And as a few of us have discussed, we think it should be Candidate Number One for Azərbaycani Words to Introduce into American Slang.  

The Urban Dictionary entry might look like this:

qəşəng ("ge-sheng" - IPA pronunciation: gæ ʃæŋ)

1. adj. - nice, lovely, beautiful, pretty, handsome.

Dude, that new ride is qəşəng.

Oh my God, Becky, did you see that totally qəşəng guy at the bar?

It's our anniversary - I have to get her something qəşəng.

2. adv. - nicely, gracefully, elegantly.  

Have you heard her perform without autotuning?  She doesn't actually sing so qəşəng.

3. verb (transitive) - to make beautiful, nice, or pretty.

Every year after Thanksgiving, we buy a Christmas tree and qəşəng it up with the whole family.

Those earrings would really qəşəng your outfit.

4.  See also qəşəngify, qəşəngness, and qəşəng-y.

Go forth and qəşəng yo' slang.

*Nerd alert: Using a word as a part of speech that is different from its normal or conventional usage is a rhetorical technique known as "anthimeria."

Today Was a Good Day

Today, I found out that I passed my Language Proficiency Interview (but I'm not posting my exact score here), and on the way home (in passing) I "played" soccer with some neighborhood kids.  By "played," I mean that as one kid happened to dribble towards me, I acted like I was challenging him, so he tried to get around me, which turned into my actually challenging him, successfully stealing the ball from him, Şükür Allahah (Thank God), and heel passing it back to another kid, who was one of the first kids I taught the fist bump + explosion.  

Goal 2?  Check.  My work here is done.

Language Proficiency Interview Information

On Saturday, we had our Language Proficiency Interviews, in which we are evaluated on a scale from novice, intermediate, advanced, to superior.  Novice, intermediate, and advanced each have three subdivisions: low, mid, and high.  (Superior is just superior.)  CEDs and YDs are ideally supposed to reach Intermediate-Mid by the end of PST, and TEFLs, Intermediate-Low.  (This is not because a lower level of proficiency is required for TEFL work, but rather because TEFLs spend a significant amount of time practice teaching.  This gives them less time to learn Azərbaycani, so they're not expected to cover the same amount of ground.)  For a full description of every level of the scale, go here.

Intermediate-Mid is defined like this:

"Speakers at the Intermediate-Mid level are able to handle successfully a variety of uncomplicated communicative tasks in straightforward social situations.

"Conversation is generally limited to those predictable and concrete exchanges necessary for survival in the target culture; these include personal information covering self, family, home, daily activities, interests and personal preferences, as well as physical and social needs, such as food, shopping, travel and lodging. Intermediate-Mid speakers tend to function reactively, for example, by responding to direct questions or requests for information. However, they are capable of asking a variety of questions when necessary to obtain simple information to satisfy basic needs, such as directions, prices and services. When called on to perform functions or handle topics at the Advanced level, they provide some information but have difficulty linking ideas, manipulating time and aspect, and using communicative strategies, such as circumlocution.

"Intermediate-Mid speakers are able to express personal meaning by creating with the language, in part by combining and recombining known elements and conversational input to make utterances of sentence length and some strings of sentences. Their speech may contain pauses, reformulations and self-corrections as they search for adequate vocabulary and appropriate language forms to express themselves. Because of inaccuracies in their vocabulary and/or pronunciation and/or grammar and/or syntax, misunderstandings can occur, but Intermediate-Mid speakers are generally understood by sympathetic interlocutors accustomed to dealing with non-natives."

Mother Tongue

Introduction

Since language is one of the most important keys to any culture, you will find below a very brief introduction to the Azerbaijani language.  After I go over the pronunciation of the Azerbaijani alphabet below, I will make every effort in my future blog posts to write Azerbaijani (Azərbaycani) words as you would see them written in-country.

General Background (excerpted from our language workbook):

"Azerbaijani is a member of the Turkic branch of the Altaic language family.  Specifically, it belongs to the Oghuz Seljub sub-group, along with (Osmanli) Turkish and some dialects of Crimean Tatar.  Other well-known members of the Turkic branch include: Uzbek, Kipchak, Kyrgyz, Tatar and Kazakh. The Turkic languages closely resemble each other and form a complex of mutually intelligible dialects. The other two branches generally presumed to make up the Altaic family are the Mongolian and Manchu Tungus languages."

Brief History of the Written Language

Beginning approximately in the 7th Century, written Azerbaijani used the Arabic alphabet, which was replaced by the Latin alphabet in January 1929.  In 1940, a new Azerbaijani alphabet was created based on Cyrillic.  After independence from the Soviet Union, Azerbaijan returned to the use of a Turkish version of a Latin alphabet having 32 letters.  There are nine vowels and twenty three consonants.  Many of the letters sound the same as in English, but there are several special characters that have no English equivalent and a few letter that look like an English letter, but sound different.

Letter	Pronunciation
A a	father
B b	bat
C c	jam
Ç ç	chat
D d	dog
E e	enter
Ə ə	man; sad
F f	football
G g	no exact equivalent but similar to "g" in "give; singer"
Ğ ğ	no English equivalent; clost to French "r" in "pardon"
H h	hat
X x	no English equivalent; close to Scottish "ch" in "loch"
I ı	happen
İ i	beach
J j	massage
K k	keep
Q q	Goat
L l	lamp
M m	map
N n	nap
O o	often
Ö ö	heard
P p	paper
R r	radio
S s	city; south
Ş ş	shelter
T t	tapestry
U u	moon
Ü ü	no exact English equivalent; very close to German übung
V v	vector
Y y	yesterday
Z z	zephyr

Notable Linguistic Characteristics

Unlike English, which has a subject-verb-object sentence structure, Azərbaycani generally has a subject-object-verb structure (e.g., "My name Yoda is."), wherein the grammatical functions are indicated by adding various suffixes to fixed stems.  Suffixes on nouns generally indicate gender and number, but there is no grammatical gender, as there is in most Romance Languages.  Azərbaycani also has Turkic vowel harmony where the vowels of suffixes must harmonize with the vowels of nouns and verb stems.  

PC Language Training

In addition to technical training regarding community economic development, our schedule generally includes four hours of formal language training per day, six days a week, conducted by our (awesome!) Language and Cultural Facilitator ("LCF"), which is reinforced by self-study (i.e., homework) and immersion (i.e., host family/community interaction).  It's definitely challenging, but seeing how well the AZ7s and AZ8s communicate in Azərbaycani after two years or one year, respectively, is both inspiring and reassuring.