Archive · 2016 · From the print edition of Saturday 17 September 2016, Vol. 24, No. 7,362
OpinionSay it in Iradi: why "peydey" has to go
The first of a new language column. It begins with payday, cash, the MPs and "problem jok", and asks the men of Talas to put them down.
This newspaper is printed in English, so I come to this subject with clean hands. But I have spent a week listening to men over forty in Talas and Semiz, and I have to report that they are still speaking the language of the gate.
Peydey for the day you are paid. Kesh for money in the hand. Em-pi for any policeman. Problem jok, "no problem", for anything that is a problem. These are the survivors of darbaza tili, the pidgin of the air base gate, which the Family Support Center's Talas Pocket Talker taught to newly arrived Americans in 1994 as "Iradi". The pidgin died with the withdrawal of 2006. Its words did not.
Iradi has words for every one of them. Aylyk kün is payday. Nakta akcha is cash. A policeman is a militsiya to his face and something else behind his back, but never an em-pi. And a problem is a problem, köygöy, not a joke at the gate. Our children already laugh at Base English as "dad talk". In Nurzhan they say worse: that a man who says peydey is an amerikan kuchugu, an American puppy.
I do not ask anyone to stop loving the 1990s. I ask only that the next time you are paid, you call it by its name. This column will return each month with another word that has stayed too long.