Together with my youngest daughter I have begun a course in Turkish on the Duolingo platform. So when I saw a post on the Diaspora social network that used the word Bir which means one, I was immediately interested if I could translate the sentence. It looked like this:
Bir Varmış, Bir Yok Olmuş
I thought: one [something], one [some other thing]. But when I tried Google translate really weird things showed up. So I asked and the explanation was that the sentence was a wordplay on the Turkish version of once upon a time.
Bir Varmış Bir Yokmuş
It really means: Once there was, Once there wasn't - a truely stunning opening, much better than once upon a time. It was part of the Ottoman stoyteller, the Meddah's, appetizer. The thing that should tempt you, and make you sit down with a cup of hot sweet coffee and let him take you away to the realm of imagination. As you can see the word Bir does not mean one, but once here. But actually it might not be that strange as one is also in the root of once, meaning one time.
You can read the explanation of the variation here. It is meant as an appetizer, not for a story, but for a tabletop rpg-game.
