u/AppropriateMood4784

I came across "Söylemek istemezdim, ağzımdan kaçtı." Shouldn't it be "istemedim", without the "z"? Or is it the difference between "I didn't mean to" and "I hadn't meant to"?

How do you translate "the apple I'm eating", "the apple I ate", and "the apple I was eating"? Are they all "yediğim elma"? Are any of them "yiyorduğum elma"? Is there some other way to translate any of the three?

Also, when is "yedik" used with none of the possessive suffixes?

I just learned "etekleri zil çalmak" = "to be overjoyed", literally "his/her skirts ringing bells"? Is this expression used for men or only women, given that the metaphor is based on skirts?

"Salmon" has an "l", even though an "l" was never pronounced in English (and the word originally had spellings like "samoun" and "sammon") and wasn't even pronounced in the French word it was borrowed from, only because some language pedants at some point thought that words should be spelled to reflect their Latin origin (in this case "salmonem"). The same explanation applies to the "b" in "debt" and "doubt", the "s" in "isle", and so forth.

My question is: Why did anyone pay attention to these people? How did publishers and writers, who'd been writing "det" and "dette" and "dout" and "dowt" and "ile" and "yle", even know what these busybodies had to say, let alone react "You know, I'm gonna start spelling the words with those extra letters for no good reason!" Obviously, it isn't that the new spellings excited the masses and trended on social media, or that the pedants made the round of YouTube talk shows and podcasts. Did they launch an enormous PR campaign? Did they write individual letters to every publisher and writer begging them to change their practices? Did they spread the word via town crier? Did they lobby Parliament and get the old spellings forbidden by law? Who funded whatever campaign they waged to make this happen?

As coincidences are common, I know the answer is probably "no", but is any consideration given to the possibility that Proto-Semitic *kanap- and Proto-Turkic *kānat, both meaning "wing", are cognates, or that one is a borrowing from the other?

For months I've been reading about people whose names appear in the Epstein files along with the number of occurrences of each. How is it in all that time that no one has found any case where what's being said about that person is evidence of a crime? I mean, for all the supposed mentions of Donald Trump or Bill Clinton, are there no verbs or nouns or prepositions next to any occurrence of those names that expose a criminal act on their part? I'm tired of seeing just names and the innuendo associated with that.

When I read about 16-hour intermittent fasts, isn't that just another way of saying having late breakfast and early dinner? Breakfast at 9, lunch at 1, dinner at 5, then it's 16 hours till breakfast the next day? Or does what it involves go beyond its literal meaning?

Why are the CEFR language competency levels A1, A2, B1, B2, C1, C2? Why aren't they just A, B, C, D, E, F? It isn't clear to me, for example, that A2 has any more of a relationship to A1 than it has to B1, that the levels should be grouped in pairs.

As I understand it, the Turkish equivalent of "Mr." is "Bey", as in "Yılmaz Bey". But I started watching some English-language programs on streaming services with Turkish subtitles on to try to follow along (it can be helpful, I picked up a lot of Dutch that way while living in Belgium and watching subtitled English and US TV shows there), and they--or at least Disney+--use "Bay". Is that correct and does it mean the same thing?

Could someone explain the components of "görmeyeli" in "Onu görmeyeli üç yıl oldu"? ("It's been three years since I last saw her".)

The words used to denote n-sided polygons where n > 4 start with "pentagon", "hexagon", "heptagon", and "octagon". These all consist of a Greek suffix denoting "angle" preceded by a numeric prefix from Greek: "penta" = 5, etc.

Then we get to the 9-sided figure. The Greek prefix for 9 is "ennea", and "enneagon" does exist, but it's used much less frequently, in favor of "nonagon", using the Latin prefix for "ninth". Do we have any information on why that happened?

I just learned that a croque-mort and a mangemort are two different things.

I'm having trouble translating "That's what we agreed to" to French without it sounding enormously complicated. Google Translate is no help with my attempt to cut down on the length of the French version: "C'est ce sur quoi nous nous sommes mis d'accord." Maybe "C'est sur ça que nous nous sommes mis d'accord"? I'm tempted to think it's "C'était notre entente" but I suspect that's wrong.

I've read about how Turks have the reputation of eating everything with yogurt, though, honestly, I didn't experience that in six days of Istanbul dining. Nevertheless, tonight at a döner place here in the US, I ordered the İskender kebab, which was served with a very healthy dollop of yogurt on one side of the plate. How is it usually used? 1. Spreading it on top of the main dish. 2. Dipping forkfuls of the main dish into it. 3. Eating it separately throughout the meal.

Side note: If I'd known I was getting so much yogurt, I wouldn't have ordered an ayran.

Casual Turkish learner here. I'm interested by getirmek and götürmek as a pair of contrasting words where the contrast appears to be conveyed by a vowel mutation, in this case the rounding of the vowels in one to get the vowels in the other. In some languages, like the Germanic ones (including English), syntactic distinction via vowel mutation is a common paradigm: ring/rang/rung, foot/feet. But I can't think of whether I've otherwise come across this in Turkish. Is this a one-off, a coincidence perhaps, or does it occur elsewhere in the language?