Turkish official language aims to mirror the monumentality of the mausoleum of the founder of the Turkish Republic, Ataturk.[/caption]
Ve Providing an illusion of unity: what Turkish use of the common-or-garden conjunction 'and' tells us about Turkey.
Ve [Veh] conj. and
Modern English loves adjectives. Look at the pudding section of the supermarket: a chocolate cake is never a chocolate cake; it is always a Belgian-chocolate cake. A custard tart is a free-range-egg custard tart. A yoghurt is a Madagascan-Vanilla-West-Country yoghurt. A shortbread - if Prince Charles made it - is an organic-Sicilian-lemon-all-butter shortbread. Marketing has triumphed, and marketeers love adjectives.
Adjectives, in their jargon, are 'live' words. They are words that stop the customer in his or her tracks and make them look, and when they look they are half-way to buying, aren't they? That's the theory at least. Marketeers know all about the importance of vividness. They have read George Orwell's essay on "Politics and the English Language", in which he lampoons the "staleness of imagery" and the "vagueness" he says are characteristic of modern writing. (I have a copy of his collected essays in front of me now: "hard-hitting and wide-ranging", says the blurb on the back.)
Adjectival hypertrophy hasn't quite reached Turkish yet. It will come, in the wake of the shopping malls and the credit cards, but for the moment most Turks are sufficiently new to money that buying a chocolate cake is pleasure enough, whether or not it has Belgian on the label. For the moment, it is still politics that shapes public language, and politics - at least of the old school - is not like marketing. It uses language as seers and prophets do: it aims not to attract people's attention, but to force them to avert their eyes, as from a sacred secret. It works best with a language that is not like an attractive knick-knack, but like one of those vast forgotten monuments that litter post-Communist eastern Europe, cold and imposing.
That's where ve comes in. Because the best way to achieve that granitic, monumental sort of language is by repeating words with a similar meaning, lists of near-synonyms with ve in between. Birlik ve beraberlik, for instance, that old Ankara favourite: "unity and togetherness." Or the phrase that conservative nationalists turn to in order to signal their dislike of any innovation: örfler ve âdetler, "customs and usages" - as in, "x or y is against our national customs and usages." Official texts are full of these couplets. The first sentence of the Prologue to the Constitution has three of them: Türk Vatanı ve Milleti, "the Turkish motherland and nation", ölümsüz önder ve eşsiz kahraman Atatürk, "the immortal leader and peerless hero Ataturk", O’nun inkılâp ve ilkeleri, "his [Ataturk's] reforms and principles."
Usually, the words repeated are nouns - good, solid, masculine words - but not necessarily. Another couplet that rises high on the official list of all-time greats is maddî ve manevî, "material and moral", altered sometimes to millî ve manevî, "national and moral", as in "national and moral values." Writing about the official rhetoric of the late Ottoman state, the historian Selim Deringil observes that it often appears "to voice the feelings of a ruling elite that is trying to convince itself of its own legitimate right to existence. The very name of the Ottoman state, memalik-i mahrusa-i şahane, (the well-protected domains of His Imperial Majesty') was a testimony to this state of mind, and a monumental irony, because they were anything but well protected." Threats to Turkey's existence have receded today, but the siege mentality is still there. Perhaps that is why ve is such a very popular word: it is a conjunction after all. It joins together. It provides an illusion of togetherness.
