On your first passage, this surprises you most: the language spoken on deck isn't the one you learned ashore. The captain says something short, the crew moves as one body, lines go somewhere, and the boat noses gently alongside. You just watch. As if everyone can hear a music you can't.
Yet the secret is simple. The sea has its own vocabulary, distilled over centuries; and the words were chosen so that, even in the most tangled moment, they leave no room to be misheard.
Why No Left and Right?
A sailor doesn't say "left," he says iskele (port); not "right," but sancak (starboard). The reason is practical: left and right change with the way you're facing. What's left for someone looking aft is right for someone looking forward — and even that much confusion is costly at sea. Port and starboard, though, are fixed to the ship's bow; they don't change wherever you look. In Turkish, "iskele" also means the quay — because cargo was always taken from that side, and the boat always came alongside the harbour on it. One word, both a direction and a landing.
Words Left by Venice
Much of this language, in Turkish, isn't Turkish at all — it's Italian. The reason lies in history: for a long time the masters of Mediterranean trade were Venice and Genoa, and whatever was learned of seafaring was largely learned from them. So the words came too. The bow is pruva, from the Venetian prova; the stern pupa, from the Italian poppa — the same root, they say, behind the English "poop deck." We don't "drop" the anchor, we funda it, from the Italian for "to send to the bottom." Heaving in the chain is vira, easing it laçka, lowering a sail mayna. And before every manoeuvre comes that fine little warning: alesta — "stand ready," from the Italian all'erta.
Still a Living Tongue
These words are not decoration. Each stands there to say one thing, in a single word, without error. But they have a strange habit too: in time, they seep ashore. Turkish poets carried them into verse, because the language of the sea is also, a little, the language of longing.
A guest picks up a word or two over a passage. First "alesta," then the fact that "iskele" is a direction, not a pier. That is the moment you're admitted to the sea. The quietest sign that you've become a sailor is that when someone says "iskele," you no longer think of the quay, but of the boat's port side. When that day comes, no one has to tell you; you simply know.
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