LANGUAGE
The
Turkish language is not an Indo-European language.
It belongs to the Altay branch of the Ural-Altay linguistic family. The
languages of this family are called Altaic because they are believed to have originated
in the high lands around the Altay Mountains of Central Asia. More than 90 percent
of all contemporary speakers of Altaic languages speak a Turkish language. The
peoples of this region led a nomadic life. Turks, too, for centuries being nomads,
took their language along whereever they moved. The Turkish language now stretches
from the Mongolian lands and China to the present day Turkey. The far eastern
border of the language now is where once the Turkish people have originated from.
The
Turkish language at present is being heavily spoken in the following countries
and regions: Turkey, Northern Cyprus, Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan, Ozbekistan,
Turkistan, Kazakistan, Kirgizistan, Tajikistan and so on.
The language
being spoken in Turkey now is accepted to be the standard Turkish and it is the
descendant of Ottoman Turkish and its predecessor, so-called Old Anatolian Turkish,
which was introduced into Anatolia by the Seljuk Turks in the late 11th century
AD. It basically differs from that of other Turkic origin groups in dialects and
accents.
In the period
of the Ottomans, many loanwords penetrated into Turkish, and their influence on
the present day Turkish spoken in Turkey can be easily traced. As you can find
in the Ataturk section to clean Turkish from foreign words, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk
made changes in the language and adopted a Latin based alphabet instead of Arabic
script in 1928. Now the Turkish alphabet has 29 letters, 8 of which are vowels
and 21 are consonants. The Turkish language is written phonetically which means
every letter is uttered while reading.
Accordingly,
the Turkish alphabet is designed for the easiest phonetic description: For instance,
to describe the sound of "ch" as in "chalk", in Turkish alphabet there is the
letter of "c" with a cedilla, a dot under the letter "c". The same applies for
"sh" sound as in "shore". In Turkish you simply put a cedilla under the letter
"s" and that new letter is one of the 29 letters of the Turkish alphabet. The
reason why we do language.asp - topnot put these letters right here on this section
is that your browser might not support Turkish characters and you may find totally
irrelevant letters if not signs instead.
Turkish characters
and you may find totally irrelevant letters if not signs instead. There is one
other interesting letter in Turkish and it is the so-called "the soft g". This
symbol is created by adding a cedilla this time to the top of the letter "g".
The reason why it is called "the soft g" is the fact that you prolong the preceding
vowel when there is a "soft g", in a way softening the utterance. To give you
an example and let's kill two words, (ooppss) birds with one stone here; every
foreigner, at least at the beginning, find it very difficult to say "thank you"
in Turkish, "tesekkur ederim". Instead, there is a more friendly and easier way,
that is, by saying "sagol", and the " g" here is a "soft g" and it is described
with a cedilla dot on its top. So, you read it as " saaol" by prolonging the "a
" sound , making it as if it were double. "Saaol", "Thanks".
Turkish is
an agglutinative language, meaning a fairly large number of affixes in Turkish
may be added to the root; each affix has one meaning or grammatical function and
retains its form more or less unaffected by the morphemes surrounding it. This
term is traditionally used in the typological classification of languages. Turkish,
Finnish, and Japanese are among the languages that form words by agglutination.To
put it more simply, there are suffixes added to the stem of the words to generate
new words or even sentences. Take the example " Cekoslavakyalilastiramadiklarimizdanmisiniz?."
If we should translate this one word sentence ( 43 letters) into English, it means
" Are you one of those that we could not have possibly turned into a Checkoslavakian?"
If we should have a closer look at the suffixes forming the sentence, we can find
the following:
| Cekoslavakya |
=
Checkoslavakia |
| li |
=
from |
| las |
=
reflexive suffix |
| tir |
= causative suffix |
| a |
=
ability |
| ma |
=
negation |
| di |
=
past tense |
| k |
=
first person plural |
| lar |
=
plural |
| i |
=
harmony suffix |
| miz |
=
first person plural |
| dan |
=
from |
| mi |
= question suffix |
| siniz |
=
second person plural |
One other descriptive feature
of the Turkish language is the Vowel and Consonant.
Harmony: According to this
principle rule front vowels (e, i, ) and back vowels (a, i, o, u) go together
with one another and do not make combinations with the other category. For example;
"erik" plum, and "ucak" airplane.
**SOME
NOTES ON THE TURKISH ALPHABET AND LANGUAGE
Since 1928,
Turkish has been written in a slightly modified Latin alphabet which is very nearly
phonetic. The Turkish alphabet has 8 vowels (A E I I O Ö U Ü ) and 21 consonants.
The letters Q,W and X do not exist in Turkish. Most letters are pronounced pretty
much as you would expect, but some are not. Once the phonetic value of all letters
is known, then it is rather easy to pronounce any word one sees or to spell any
word one hears.The following letters require explanation:
Aa = "a" as in "card" or
"dark", never as "a" in"cat" or "back" ( kan = blood )
Cc = "J" as in "judge" ( can= life, soul, pronounced like "John" )
Çç = "ch" as in "church"( çay= tea, pronounced "chay", rhymes with "buy" )
Ee = "e" as in "bed" ( ekmek =bread )
Gg = "g" as in "get" ( gelin =bride )
g ( yumusak ge [soft g] Never appears as the first letter in a word; essentially
silent; sometimes lengthens preceding vowel; sometimes pronounced like "y" in
"yet" (dag =mountain, pronounced daa , rhymes with the "baa" of "baa baa black
sheep"; diger =other, pronounced diyer )
li( undotted "i" ) "u" as in "radium" or "i" as in "cousin" (isik =ligth, irmak
= river )
Ii( dotted "i" ) ="i" as in "sit" ( bir = one, pronounced like "beer" )
Jj = "j" as in "azure" (garaj = garage, pronounced as in French & English )
Oo = "o" as in "fold"(okul =school )
Öö German "ö" as in "König" or French "eu" as in "peur"( göl = lake, rhymes with
furl)
Ss="s" as in "sing", never pronounced like a "z" as the "s" in "his"(ses = voice)
Ss="sh"as in "ship" (sey = thing, pronounced "shey" , rhymes with "hay")
Uu= "oo" as in "boot" (buz = ice, pronounced like "booze")
Üü German "ü" as in "für" or French "u" as in "tu" (gül = rose)
Zz="z" as in "zoo" (beyaz = white)
Turkish belongs to the Turkic
branch of the Altaic language family.The earliest Turkic inscriptions date from
the 7th century C.E. and Islamic texts written in Turkic appear in the 11th century.
Turkish, the language of modern Turkey, is spoken by about 60 million people.
Other important Turkic languages are Azeri (15 million speakers) and Uzbek (14
million speakers). Turkish formerly used the same alphabet as Arabic, but has
been written in the Latin alphabet since 1928 as mentioned above; since 1940,
Azeri and Uzbek have been written in Cyrillic but efforts are now under way to
replace it with Latin.
As an Altaic language, Turkish
has virtually nothing in common with English or other Indo-European languages
except for some loan words, usually from French or English.
Turkish grammar is complex,
but also quite regular. Its two most characteristic features are :
(1) vowel harmony (vowels within a word follow certain harmonic patterns) and
(2) agglutination (addition suffixes to words.) Through this process, astoundingly
long word phrases can be encountered. For example, the following means, "Maybe
you are one of those whom we were not able to Turkify." Türklestiremedigimizlerdensinizdir.
Another interesting feature
is that there is no gender in Turkish.The same word , "o", for example, means
"he", "she" and "it".
Turks generally call each
other by their given names.For example, a man whose name is Ahmet Kuran would
be called Ahmet bey( bey = Mr.), and his wife whose name is Ayse Kuran would be
called Ayse hanim ( hanim =Ms.). Good friends drop the "bey" and "hanim". But
a letter would be addressed to Bay ve Bayan Ahmet Kuran (Mr. and Mrs...).
* Assembled by Derya
Sendil
** Assembled by Richard Chambers / Chicago University
