About The Turkish 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...).
