11th July

11th July

I discovered today that Present Simple Tense, and Future Simple Tense, are the same thing in Kazakh. I don’t know if I should be pleased that this simplifies things, or worried that is has taken me so long to realise (or at least remember) this!

Verb + a/ye/e (depending on if the last letter of the verb is a vowel, voiced sound, or voiceless sound)+ personal ending (first/second/third person has different endings)

So, “I take”, and “I will take”, are the same,

“Myen al-a-mun”

I am still to make my mind up about this language. So much of it is just annoying, having inherited the Turkic rule of Symharmony (how a word sounds is important, for example, only hard sounding vowels, or soft sounding vowels, will feature in a word, not a mix of the two). But every now and then, something nice comes along, like this. So who knows what my position on it will be after two years.

I read this quote this morning, and I thought I would share it with you. It was from a document given to political leaders in Europe, in order to justify Russian expansion into Central Asia.

“The position of Russia in Central Asia is that of all civilised states which are brought into contact with half-savage nomad populations possessing no fixed social organisation. In such cases it always happens that the more civilised state is forced, in the interests of security of its frontiers and its commercial relations, to exercise a certain ascendancy over those whose turbulent and unsettled character make them undesirable neighbours”, Russian Foreign Minister, Prince Gorchakov, 1864

I found it interesting, that such a view, aired so many years before the Soviet period of political and population expansion into the same area. While in 1864 it was done to protect Russian commercial interests, and to stem British influence in the area, in the 1930s it was done to ‘civilise’ those within Russia’s borders and force the same ‘half-savage nomads’ to join the modern world. At that time, Kazakhstan was still very much a nomadic culture, and in as little as 10 years, Soviet Russia had changed that forever.