Sepia Saturday 272:صپا صاترذاي

Our theme image comes from the collection of the SALT Institute in Istanbul, Turkey (featured on their Flickr Stream) and dates back to 1924 and shows a powerful looking tractor at an International Agricultural Fair in Adana, Turkey. You can go wherever you want to with this image (and indeed with this tractor). 

The lettering on the tractor caught my eye. It's so beautiful and graceful and looks like art. What's it doing on that machine? What does it say? John Deere? I tried to translate it but couldn't figure it out using the Turkish alphabet keys online. 

I've always enjoyed looking at foreign alphabets for the beauty of the letters, not necessarily for the meaning. In days of yore, before we left the country on a trip, we'd learn at least a few words of the native language where we were headed, for navigation purposes. But we don't have to do that anymore: If you have any trouble with translation, Google rescues you with little effort. A few feet of library space formerly occupied by language guides can now be reclaimed. 

My husband speaks Chinese and can read and write Mandarin. Traveling in Asia with him has been immensely instructive and he's taught me many Chinese characters and how they are based on hieroglyphics. For instance, the character for home: 

• The current Chinese character for "home" is written like this:.
• The way of writing this character at Qin-shi-huang's time (1st Qin Dynasty Emperor, 259 B.C.) is:. You can see that its top part is obviously a house roof.
• Then what is the thing in the house? Actually it is the charcter for "pig". See the way of writing this character in West Zhou Dynasty (1046 B.C.): . Oh, this is really a picture of a pig. So here you will understand the Chinese symbol meaning of the character "Jia"(home), which means a house with a pig inside. This was exactly the way of life in primitive period of one who had a home: having a shelter, and breeding some livestock.
• The way of writing this character in the Inscriptions on Tortoise Shells and Bones is like this:.

An artist friend of ours who recently moved to Cambodia, painted Burmese numbers on his stairs. He and his partner converted an old building into a beautiful B and B, shop and bar -  Bric-a-Brac, Battambang, Cambodia. 

The numbers look beautiful on his stairs. 

In Islam, it's forbidden to decorate places of worship with likenesses of living things. The way around this prohibition, and isn't there always a way around? is to make images out of writing. Calligrams are acceptable. 

Horse - arabic alphabet

The whirling dervish image, while stretching the permissible images made from writing to the limit, is a thing of beauty. And fits the theme - we saw the dervishes in Turkey. 

  

Many times for Sepia Saturday I've used our old family photos with my father's writing on them in white ink. I found this one recently which I think fits the theme this week. The photo is so bad that I'm guessing my Dad thought it couldn't be any worse. I had to look twice to realize the hieroglyph was the date. May 2nd, 1949. 

Kids on Dominion Street. I'm the small one second from the left. My big sister is tallest of all on the right. A few years later, Linda whom Eilleen has her arm around in this photo, pushed me in the snow, beat me up and sat on me. No doubt I deserved what I got. Nevertheless, I came into the house, crying pitiably, "Linda beat me up!" Eilleen, a stickler for justice, took off her glasses, pulled on her coat, ran out the door, caught Linda, pushed her on the ground and shoved her snowy mitts in her mouth, telling her in the future to pick on somebody her own size. A truly heroic feat, I dare say it was the only act of violence she committed in her entire sweet life. 

Motor on over to صپا صاترذاي for more stories with traction. 

In case you haven't guessed, the link (I hope) is Turkish for Sepia Saturday. As far as I know we don't have any Turkish Sepians. If we do and I've written something terrible, please forgive me. My intentions were good.  صپا صاترذاي