The morning lesson for Çarşamba, Wednesday, is about travel. So we learn a little about the dolmuş, which is like a taxi except it has a regular route and specific stops and is always shared, and the minibüs and otobüs, the tren and the uçak, plane. But the primary concern, of course, is places and times. Some notable place words:
merkez : downtown
banka : bank
postahane : post office
otel : hotel
hava alanı : airport
istasyon : train station
Times are important for travel, too, and you need to know numbers:
0 sıfır
1 bir
2 iki
3 üç
4 dört
5 beş
6 altı
7 yedi
8 sekiz
9 dokuz
10 on
11 onbir
12 oniki
If you want to ask what time it is, you say, Saat kaç? If you want to ask at what time something else is, you say Ne zaman? If you wanted to say, "Ten o'clock", you'd say, Saat on. Minutes after the hour up to the half-hour are marked by geçiyor, minutes before the hour back to the half-hour are marked by var:
Saat onu on geçiyor (It is ten past ten)
Saat ona on var (It is ten to ten)
Time, of course, is always a complicated feature of language, but that's enough to get a sense of how Turkish handles it. There are also, of course, adverbs of time:
şimdi : now
sonra : later
bugün : today
dün : yesterday
yarın : tomorrow
önce : before
bazen : sometimes
For places, Turkish has a locative case, which is -da/-de or -ta/-te depending on the letters that come before. If you say otelde, that means 'at or in the hotel', and masada means 'on the table'.
That gives a taste of how Turkish handles times and place. Tomorrow, Perşembe, we get to the business side of travel: banking, mailing, phoning.
*****
Tayfun and Gillian Çağa, Conversational Turkish in 7 Days, Passport Books (Chicago: 1992).
