Sad Ironies

I am learning Turkish these days.  The process rekindles the sweet memories and excitements I used to experience as a kid and later teenager, when I used to learn English as a second language.  I still feel the same joy of opening doors to a new world through learning a language.  I also realize how much slower my brain seems to be processing and remembering newly learned grammar rules and vocabularies.  It is called aging I guess.  It is nice to discover so many common words and cultural similarities in Turkish, Persian, and Arabic.  It seems like as long as you know one of these languages, you can pick up the vocabulary of another one, fairly well.  Naturally, I look for such commonalities, and how one word changes as it travels from one language to another.  These days, every time I find the relationship between a Turkish word and a Farsi word, I become happy for having been able to solve a puzzle.  It must be the analyst in me, liking to break down the words into pieces (and Turkish is the perfect language for doing so, since phrases and sentences can be made by adding suffixes and prefixes to a word).

But for once, I was sad to find such a relationship.  Well, not really the relationship between words this time, rather learning a Turkish word that is used as a name in Tehran.  Maybe somethings are better left unlearned.  I learned that "ev" means home in Turkish, and "evin" means house.  How has the sweetest of words and places become a prison in Iran, the forced house of many?!