An Apology to Kazakh.

My linguistics professor in college told us a story about a linguist studying languages in interior Africa. One reseracher was investigating a language that early explorers had described as simple and primitive, having only one tense apiece for future and past. The linguist uncovered a much more complex picture, and after discovering and documenting the sixth or seventh tense, he finally asked the Africans why the earlier explorers had claimed there were only two tense. "Oh, those people were very stupid," the Africans answered. "We only spoke to them very simply so they could understand."

Earlier in my training I accused Kazakh of being a rude language. I thought this because there's no word for please, no word for "to want", and people rarely say "thank you" or the phrase that is sometimes inappropriately translated as "you're welcome". (There is one phrase which means "you're welcome", but only for food. Literally, it is "may there be food", and people do use that all the time, as thank you is often said during toasts and at formal meals. I have never, not once, heard anyone besides Americans say the phrase given in our Peace Corps handbook as meaning "you're welcome" in generic situations ("eshtenge etpeidy"), and though some of my students use the other version ("okhasa zhok"), they once told me they only do it because they're imitating me.)

Consequently, if you try to translate this kind of conversation:

Person A: Do you want the book?
Person B: Yes, could I have it, please.
Person A: Here you go.
Person B: Thank you.
Person A: You're welcome.

You get:

Person A: Will you take the book?
Person B: I will take it.
Person A: Here.
Person B: ---
Person A: ---

And this was, in fact, how I communicated with my host family in training. Instead of expressing desires like "I want to go to the store," I said it like a fact: "I will go to the store." After a year and a half I'm still struggling to get out of the habit of saying thank you and you're welcome. To me, this felt very coarse, and I accused Kazakh of being coarse.

However, now that I'm getting into the language a little more, I'm finding many different ways of expressing intention with subtle differences in urgency, certainty, pleading, and other syntactic features that are associated with politeness. They simply have completely different gramatical forms than in English, and so don't lend themselves to being learnt right away - or used in speech with Kazakh-challenged foreigners. For example, you can say "I will go" like this:

Men baramin.

Which means "I go" was training-speak for "I want to go", "I would like to go", "May I go, please," etc. But now I know there is also:

Men baraiyn.
Men baraiynshy.
Mening bargym keledi.
Mening bargym kelip tur.
Men barsam eken.
Men barmakpyn.

Similarly, in training, "please go" was:

Baryngyzshy.

Which is just the command "go" with an ending that is supposed to mean please. But now I know there exists:

Barsangyzshy.
Barsangyz eken.
Barghaisyz.
Baryp beringiz(shy).
Baryp koingiz(shy).
Baryp turingiz(shy).
Baryp zhuringiz(shy).
Barganyngyzdy kalaimyn.

And all the above forms have both a formal and informal second-person ending that doubles the length of the list. Now, I admit that I don't understand the subtelties between them. But their existence shows that my early suggestion that Kazakh is a langauge that can't express shades of politeness was completely wrong, and based on my expectation of grammatical forms of politeness similar to my own language. (The grammar of some of these are really strange: barsangyz eken, taken literally, sounds something like if-you-go-it-seems, but it means "I would like you to go".)

This is not to say that knowledge of these grammar forms suddenly makes Kazakhstani society a courteous place to live. First of all, living in a Russophone environment, I'm not sure how often many of these forms are really used. And second of all, I think there really is a lack of courtesy and politeness in Kazakhstani general society. (If you doubt this, I have some stories for you.) However, there's no blaming the language.