Turkish Difficulty
Just saw this on a banner ad and thought it was illustrative of how hard it is to go outside your native and nearby language families:
YİYEBİLDİĞİNİZ KADAR
You say this yee-yebeel-dee-eeneez kadar.” And make a little whistle on that R if you can do it like Kristin can.
Yİ is irregular to start with, but it’s the semi-conjugated stub of the verb “yemek,” which means “to eat.” Yemek also means cooked food, by the way. Uncooked food or food products are termed “yiyecek,” which in this case translates to “that which will be eaten” but can also mean “he/she/it will eat.” This can work as a participle, but in this case it looks like the proper term is “relative clause.”
The next Y lets you add on the EBİL which by logical causation, grace, or luck actually means “able.”
The DİĞ would be DİK if nothing came after it, but since there is another suffix, the K converts to a “soft G,” since a K would stop the word mid-suffix-chain train wreck. In basic usage it makes a verb be fourth person past tense, but it gets you into a non-future participial/relative-clause mood when used mid-verb like this, especially when strung together with an EBİL or something exotic.
So, at this point you have “eat able that which.”
Here’s a fun twist versus English: clauses like this are actually possessed in Turkish. So, İNİZ is actually the respectful second-person possessive suffix. Which puts us with “eat able that which yours sir.”
KADAR is an Arabic word (Arabic often screws up the grammar, provides a lot of the language’s irregularities, and in this word’s case takes on a lot of weird and disjointed purposes). It means “extent” most of the time. If you say “this big,” kadar is in there, but it can also mean “up to.” Thanks, Arabic.
So, even a clever grammarian at this point, without applying any additional context to the situation, would translate to “eat able that which yours sir to an extent.”
To rephrase a little more in English without losing the fun, you have “to the extent of your ability to eat.”
Or, as we might say, “All you can eat.”