Turkish (?) graffiti in Japan

October 20, 2007 1:46 AM

Can anyone shed some light on this Turkish (I think) graffiti my friend saw in a (Japanese) train station and copied down in a hurry? (Text inside -- might be unsavory or even NSFW for all I know.)

I am hoping that someone will be able to make sense of it despite the many transcription errors that my version here no doubt contains. (Apparently it was particularly difficult to identify the spaces between words.)

VAKKAS
SENYOKDİYE SATLERCEOTURDUM
SELS SENSİZ VAKKAS BALIBAY
YOK YÜREQUMDE
TELİKLERIN ENSON GIKROIN
BEN GİDİŞIN YERSİZ DÖN HABESIZ

My sincere apologies in advance if it is in fact something offensive, and you can understand Turkish, and it offends you. My friend and I have absolutely no idea what it might say.

posted by No-sword to writing & language (10 comments total)

All I can do is confirm that it's Turkish and tell you that I think the words ending in -siz and -s?z are second-person verbs. Also, Turkish does not use the letter Q.
posted by oaf at 4:10 AM on October 20, 2007

that question mark is supposed to be a lowercase dotless i
posted by oaf at 4:10 AM on October 20, 2007

You've got some words mashed together; I think the second line should be
SEN YOK D?YE SATLERCE OTURDUM

Also, there's no Q in Turkish, so something's gone amiss there.

Anyway, we obviously have to wait patiently until an actual Turkish speaker shows up.

Dude, why all the sincere apologies? Do you know where you are? This is MetaFilter, home of offensive filth!
posted by languagehat at 7:12 AM on October 20, 2007

Too late I see that oaf already mentioned the Q thing.

Also, why did the dotted cap I turn to a question mark when I copied and pasted it? Bah.
posted by languagehat at 7:13 AM on October 20, 2007

Also, there's no Q in Turkish, so something's gone amiss there.

But there is in Uighur or in Kazakh, when written in the Roman alphabet. Choice of alphabet in those languages has been a political decision for a while, so random graffiti should be able to use Roman characters. Anybody know any of the Central Asian Turkic languages?
posted by dilettante at 7:34 AM on October 20, 2007

There is a "q" as dilettante mentions in Azerbaijani too, which I sort of know, but can't read this well.
posted by k8t at 7:38 AM on October 20, 2007

My go-to Turk tells me that it's Turkish, but either written/transcribed very badly or in some dialect (Azeri, Turkmen, Kirghiz, etc.)

He says it appears to be some kind of message to someone named Vakkas who didn't show up for a planned meeting:

"Vakkas (I guess it is a name)
Because you are not here, I sit (wait) for hours
Without you Vakkas Balibay (I guess this is the surname)
Nothing in my heart
TEL?KLERIN ENSON GIKROIN (Does not make sense; 'EN SON' means 'the very last')
I(?) your leaving is undue (~irrelevant), come back without informing
(~ quickly i.e. don't waste time to inform)"
posted by escabeche at 1:05 PM on October 20, 2007 [1 favorite]

Thanks, everyone, and especially escabeche and his/her go-to Turk!

He says it appears to be some kind of message to someone named Vakkas who didn't show up for a planned meeting

That makes sense -- the writing was quite large, and anyone leaving the station by that exit would have seen it. They used to have blackboards at train stations that anyone can use for things like this, but they seem to have been phased out due to absolutely everyone (except Vakkas Balibay, apparently) owning a cellphone.

(As for the Q, I had my Wikipedia-based doubts, but I figured better to post it as transcribed than try to proofread it myself.)

Dude, why all the sincere apologies? Do you know where you are? This is MetaFilter, home of offensive filth!

Yeah, but imagine the firestorm that would have erupted if it had turned out to mention bicycles or circumcision.
posted by No-sword at 2:46 PM on October 20, 2007

Also, why did the dotted cap I turn to a question mark when I copied and pasted it?

Because it was a special (Unicode) character which AskMe's ascii text input area couldn't interpret. This happens most frequently (in my experience) when copying apostrophes and quatation marks -- Microsoft products tend to automatically replace the simple, vertical type (as shown on your keyboard) with the superscript comma and open-close quatation marks, which don't have ascii equivalents.
posted by Rash at 3:22 PM on October 20, 2007

Now all this situation asks for is for Vakkas to turn out to be a Mefite.
posted by Anything at 4:53 AM on October 21, 2007