Efendim?

Today in class my students were cutting and gluing toys and playground cut-outs into their books. Mostly left to their own devices, I had hoped that the students would be quiet for the lesson to give my head a much needed 40 minutes of silence. Of course this wasn't the case, and many of the students were talking or singing to their classmates or themselves. A boy, Necmettin, who sits closest to the teachers desk, kept trying to tell me what seemed to be a joke/pun. It went like this:

Telefbir, telefiki, telefüç, telefdört, telefbeş, telefaltı, telefyedi, telefsekiz, telefdokuz, TELEFON!

At first I didn't follow but when I finally got it, it was hilarious to me. Basically they took 'telef' and put all the numbers from 1-10 at the end. The number 10 in Turkish is 'on,' which completes the pun to give you the word telephone. Until that point I had no idea where Necmettin was going with the nonsensical words centred around the word(?) 'telef.'

Çok komik!

It doesn't work in English, but this is it translated:

Telefone, teleftwo, telefthree, teleffour, teleffive, telefsix, telefseven, telefeight, telefnine, teleften.

(Although now that I write it down, telefONE badly pronounced sounds like telephone... so it could work in English too!)


On a side note- after I wrote the above, I google translated "Çok komik!" just to make sure that it was spelled correctly/had the meaning I thought it had based on hearing my students say it all the time. It means 'very funny' but here is what google translate showed as the English translation-- hilarious!



Or should I say Lol!