- In Turkish, the verb 'to talk' is konuşmak and the verb 'to run' is koşmak. My language helper had just told me that she'd been running in the park that morning. So I, instead of asking if she did a lot of running in the park, asked if she did a lot of talking in the park.
- A traditional Turkish snack is a simit, which is a bagel-shaped, crusty, sesame seed covered bread snack, and there are usually lots of street vendors selling them. There is also a softer, more doughy version, which is called açma. And the word for uncle (father's brother, to be precise. There's a different word for mother's brother but that is beside the point) is amca. When feeling peckish on the walk to language school one morning, L completely confused a simitçi (simit seller) by asking for 'one uncle please'.
- A few weeks back, a couple of Greek friends needed a bed for the night in Istanbul and stayed at ours. Now, the word for a Greek person is Yunan and the word for Greece is Yunanistan. But, if you accidentally shift an 's' in place of an 'n' and duplicate the 'u' instead of using an 'a' (which, in my head at least, is a perfectly understandable thing to do), you end up saying yunus instead. So I thought I was explaining to my language helper that we'd had two Greeks stay the previous night. What I actually said was we'd had two dolphins stay the previous night.
And these are just some of the ones we know about! What worries me more is what I've inadvertently said to some poor, unsuspecting person without ever realising my mistake...
