Words are pure magic.
But we easily forget that. In truth, we tend to take for granted the very things that deserve our awe, our respect, our deepest appreciation. It is just mind-blowing that with what is essentially a humble construct of an alphabet, a limited number of letters, which are basically squiggles and shapes, human beings have been creating and recreating endless possible meanings and nuances throughout millennia.
As an immigrant author writing fiction in a third language — French is the earliest language I heard as an infant but then sadly lost, Turkish is my mother tongue, Spanish became my second language as a child and English became my sanctuary, my exile, my home — I try to pay loving attention to words that cannot be translated easily or directly. Lexical gaps. The lacunae hiding inside daily verbal communication. I find them fascinating.
Take the word “temporal”, for instance. Pertaining to time. It can be translated indeed, but often at the expense of losing its historical complexity. In Latin its root is organically connected to another word, “temple”, meaning the side of the head.
That is because, the ancients understood that as we age we first lose melanin in the place between the forehead and the ear. This is precisely where the greying of the hair, the weakening of the body starts and the passage of time reveals itself.
The signs of ageing, therefore, initially appear in our temples, and this is why, the word “temple” and the word" “temporal” are etymologically linked.
Isn’t that fascinating?
The 17th Century poet and polymath John Milton, who completed most of his major works after losing his vision, was an astonishing word-smith, a builder of concepts. It is estimated that he introduced over 600 words into the English language, making him the greatest neologist, way ahead of John Donne, and according to several scholars, even Shakespeare (For more information on Milton and Shakespeare, do kindly read The Guardian article titled “John Milton — Our Greatest Word-maker”, and particularly, the linguistic research conducted by Prof. Gavin Alexander, lecturer in English at Cambridge university and fellow of Christ’s College, Milton's alma mater.)
The Paradise Lost is not only a literary and cultural gem for the art of storytelling but also a linguistic sensation. Milton believed that books were lifelong companions, not inanimate objects kept on shelves. They were not dead things. To the contrary, a good book contained within its pages a great potency of life.
We owe Milton so many brilliant words that we use today without a second thought: debauchery, complacency, fragrance, padlock, embellishing, dismissive, sensuous, jubilant, terrific, self-delusion, stunning….. Each time we write or utter any of these, we ought to send a little salute to the blind poet.
Take the everyday term “pandemonium”:, for instance, coined in The Paradise Lost — based on the Greek root referring to “all demons” Milton used it to refer to “the gathering place of dark spirits”, if not, the capital of Hell. In time, the word expanded to designate wild uproar, ongoing disorder or loud commotion.
Milton realised that the human mind was its own place, and it had the ability to “make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven.”
In the era of social media kingdoms when we are all constantly bombarded with manicured and heavily edited images of perfect lives, perfect smiles, we somehow forget Milton’s wise teaching. A big house, a chic garment, a luxury car, dinner at an expensive restaurant or holiday at some ‘exotic” destination…. none of these will bring us any joy or satisfaction unless our mind is already inside Heaven and not wallowing in its own Hell.
Share Unmapped Storylands with Elif Shafak
Turkish is an astonishing language when it comes to expressing affection and generating endearments. We can communicate our love in so many un-translatable ways. When I was a child my grandmother would call me “gözbebegim”, which means “the pupil of my eye.” She would also say: “my breath”, “my two lungs’, ‘the centre of my heart” or “the corner of my liver.”
How can I possibly say that in English?
Take the word “can”, meaning soul. It has a force of its own. When you desperately pine for something, for example yearn to be in another place, an elsewhere, you can say “my soul is the one that longs for it”.
In Turkish the soul has its own agency.
Years later, when I started reading the poems of the great Garcia Lorca I found exactly the same sentiment: “Today, in my heart a vague trembling of stars…”
In Lorca’s poetry, the heart is independent, alive and mysteriously restless — not a subordinate part that we can control or dominate with reason.
Going back to Turkish once again, here is a very simple change with huge meanings. The suffix -cim can be added to any name (with slight modifications for vowel harmony) and the result is an interesting linguistic leap from a formal tone to a loving, caring, informal one.
The name Leyla will thus become Leyla-cım, or Philip will become Philip-cim or Elizabeth will turn into Elizabeth-cim and so on.
With a tiny little suffix you can express a whole complex emotion of love!
If you were to invent a totally new term in your poetry or prose, or if you were to gently introduce a meaningful morpheme, a suffix to form a derivative, not out of thin air, but by following and respecting the rhythm, the cadence and the structural patterns of a language the way Milton had done centuries ago, what would that be? Where, in your opinion are the lexical gaps, the silences, the important things that we feel deep inside our soul but for which we have no words — yet.
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