Most people are aware of the fact that the majority of Asian language depend on tone as a crucial feature. Falling or rising tone within a single word is as distinctive as changing a vowel... so for example, the English words bit boat bat bait are all distinguished from each other exclusively by the vowel between the consonants. In different varieties of Chinese and Korean and other Asian languages, a word can have exactly the same sounds in a row and still mean different thing, depending on tone, or inflection. The classic example is ma in certain varieties of Chinese, which can mean horse or mother or a couple other things depending on how it's said.
Most people don't kinow about vowel harmony, which is a quirky thing that happens in a handful of languages, including Turkish. In the simplest terms, this means that if there's a certain kind of vowel in the first syllable of a word, it might have to change (or assimilate) to match the characteristics in a later syllable or even later in the sentence. If we did this in English it would work something like this: Round Midnight might become Rind Midnight -- so that the vowels harmonize.
If that makes any sense at all, I'll be surprised, but really I didn't mean to go into so much detail anyway. This was really just an intro to the odd fact that a writer in Turkey, a young man with the musical name Ömer Bahri Gördebak has a blog, on on his blog is a page about me. And on that page is an awful photo, in which I look like Jimmy Durante in the nose department. Now, I'm not vain about my looks because truthfully, there's not a lot to be vain about, but for some reason this bothers me. I know what my faults and strengths are. My nose is on neither list. My nose is on the could-be-better-not-too-awful list. I have never seen another photograph of me that made my nose look like this, so I assume it is some kind of fluke. Or a joke. At any rate, this public announcement: my nose was hijacked some time during the taking and development of this photo, and I disclaim any ownership of the one you see there.
Beyond this, I am consumed with curiosity because I don't have even a smattering of Turkish. I know about vowel harmony, sure, but otherwise, nada. I can usually puzzle out basics of things written in a European language I don't speak by some mysterious process that has to do with multiple historical and social varieties of English, German, Swiss German and Italian that I can shake up and pour out to use as a magic potion on, say, a French text or a Swedish one. What emerges is a basic picture of the content. But I have no idea about Ömer Bahri Gördebak, whether he is admonishing me for my frequently self-absorbed posts or what he considers bad advice on writing, or if he is claiming me as a long lost cousin, or if he is just posting photos of American women with big (or apparently big) noses.
Now that I've confessed my curiosity and straightened you out about my nose I'm going to go write some more.