On Fri, 14 Jul 2017, Alex Smith wrote: > > Bu demeçin kararı için ben bağırım: Bu bir bağırış kararı için > > değil. > > And here are machine translations of those corrected messages: > > > For the sake of this statement I am a coward: it is not a shouting > > decision.
This is the weirdest thing. If I take your sentence as above and paste it into Google with correct Turkish alphabet, I get exactly what you say, with "I am a coward". But if I take what appears in the archives, with the "Icelandic" characters: https://mailman.agoranomic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/private/agora-business/2003-April/001312.html Bu demeçin kararý için ben baðýrým: Bu bir baðýrýþ kararý için deðil. and paste it directly into google's translator without specifying language, I get the correct language-detection (Turkish), and the correct "I shout/cry" (i.e. I cry out) for the word bağırım. I also get "I cry" when I paste bağırım in on its own, so I have no idea how 'coward' comes into it! If I paste that full 'Icelandic' sentence I get "For the decision of this statement, I shout:" which seems like nearly understandable Agoran-speak. Which means that a native-Turkish speaker might puzzle over the strange Icelandic letters, but a language-naive typical Agoran with a translation tool would actually understand it better! In retrospect I might have used the verb çağır which is used for "call" in parliamentary procedure (as in "call to order") and interestingly, I just learned, for function calls in programming. Bağır is used more for shouting or "cries from the heart", as in "the protesters on the street were calling for justice." Which ones fits best for calling an Agoran judgement? I always thought of judgement-calling as a "loud" demand for justice rather than a minor procedure of order, but YMMV...? > (as far as I can tell) «Mutluðuz» isn't a real word in any language. If you paste in the full "Mutluðuz 1st Nisan" from the Subject line into the translator, you get the intended "Happy April 1st" (April Fools Day was an Agoran Holiday at the time, and a traditional time to try silly scams). It's an idiomatic conjugation of mutlu, "happy" (I think this conjugation of 'happy' is only ever used to wish someone a specific happy occasion and may be a bit old fashioned - it's first person plural and, read literally, is something like "let's have a happy day"). It's interesting that if you remove the subject but leave "Mutluðuz", the translator loses all sense of the word. -G.
