I read this on Language Log yesterday. (Bowdlerised for syndication reasons):

The Turkish newspaper Hürriyet reports a tragic consequence of the failure to localize cell phones.

Ramazan Çalçoban sent his estranged wife Emine the text message:

Zaten sen sıkışınca konuyu değiştiriyorsun.

“Anyhow, whenever you can’t answer an argument, you change the subject.”

Unfortunately, what she thought he wrote was:

Zaten sen sikişınce konuyu değiştiriyorsun.

“Anyhow, whenever they are f-ing you, you change the subject.”

She showed the message to her father, who angrily called Ramazan and accused him of calling his daughter a prostitute. Ramazan went to his wife’s home to apologize, only to be attacked by his wife, her father, and two sisters. He was stabbed in the chest but succeeded in grabbing a knife, stabbing his wife, and getting away. Emine died of her wounds; Ramazan killed himself in jail.

How exactly did this tragedy come about? Turkish has four high vowels, front unrounded /i/, written <i>, front rounded /y/, written <ü>, back unrounded /ɨ/, written <ı>, and back rounded /u/, written <u>. The verb form that Ramazan wrote was sıkışınca, which is a gerund of sıkışmak, literally “to get wedged, to get in a tight spot”, but here with the sense of “to be unable to answer an argument”. What his wife thought he wrote was sikişince, the corresponding form of sikişmek “to f-. The verb stems sıkış “to get wedged” and sikiş “to f- differ only in the backness of their vowels, which is reflected graphically in the presence or absence of a dot. The problem was that Emine’s cell phone was not localized properly for Turkish and did not have the letter <ı>; when it displayed Ramazan’s message, it replaced the <ı>s with <i>s.

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