Turkish language

Classification

Turkish is a member of the Turkish family of languages, which includes Gagauz, and Khorasani Turkish in addition to Osmanli Turkish. The Turkish family is a subgroup of the Oghuz languages, themselves a subgroup of the Turkic languages, which many linguists believe to be a part of of an Altaic language family.

Like Finnish and Hungarian, Turkish has vowel harmony, is agglutinative and has no grammatical gender. The basic word order is Subject Object Verb. Turkish has a T-V distinction: second-person plural forms can be used for individuals as a sign of respect.

Geographic distribution

Turkish is spoken in Turkey and by minorities in 35 other countries. In particular, Turkish is used in countries that formerly (in whole or part) belonged to the Ottoman Empire, such as Bulgaria, Romania, the former Yugoslavia (specifically in Kosovo and Metohija), the Republic of Macedonia, and Greece (especially in Western Thrace). About two million Turkish speaking people live in Germany.

Official status

Turkish is the official language of Turkey, and is one of the official languages of Cyprus. In Turkey, the Turkish Language Foundation (Türk Dil Kurumu) was founded by Kemal Atatürk in 1932 as the Türk Dili Tetkik Cemiyeti ("Society for the Investigation of the Turkish Language"), an independent body. The Turkish Language Foundation was influenced with the ideology that the purity of the language had to be preserved by expunging words and grammatical constructions of Persian and Arabic (see below for more on replacing old words). In August, 1983, when Turkey was under martial law as a result of the military coup of 1980, the Turkish Language Society was brought under the control of the prime ministry.

Dialects

Dialects of Turkish include Istanbul Turkish (the "standard" dialect, İstanbul Türkçesi), Rumelian (or Rumelice, spoken in Rumelia) , Kıbrıs (spoken in Cyprus), Edirne (spoken in Edirne), Doğu (spoken in Eastern Turkey), Karadeniz (spoken in the Black Sea region), Ege (spoken in the Aegean region), Akdeniz (spoken in the Mediterranean region, in the South), and Orta Anadolu (spoken in the Middle Anatolian region).

Sounds

One characteristic feature of Turkish is vowel harmony, meaning that the same word will have either front or back vowels, but not both. For example, in vişne "sour cherry" i is closed unround front and e is open unround front. Stress is usually on the last syllable, with the exception of some suffix combinations and words like masa ['masa].

Consonants

The phoneme Template:IPA usually referred to as "soft g"(yumuşak g), "ğ" in Turkish orthography, actually represents a rather weak front-velar or palatal approximant between front vowels. It never occurs at the beginning of a word, but always follows a vowel. When word-final or preceding another consonant, it lengthens the preceding vowel.

Vowels

Image:Turkish vowel chart.png

Writing system

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Turkish is written using a modified version of the Latin alphabet, which was introduced in 1928 by Kemal Atatürk as part of his efforts to modernize Turkey. He ordered the new alphabet to an Armenian named Agop Dilaçar. The family name was given to him by Atatürk, which means "language opener". Until 1928, Turkish was written using a modified version of the Arabic alphabet (see Ottoman Turkish language), but use of the Arabic alphabet was outlawed after the Latin alphabet was introduced.

The sounds of the individual letters exhibit few surprises. Other than behaviors that are to be expected, "c" is pronounced like "j" in "jail"; "ç" is pronounced like "ch" in "church"; "j" is pronounced like French "j"; "ş" is pronounced like "sh" in "sheet"; "ı" is pronounced like the "a" in "baton" or the "e" in "munificent"; and "ğ" is pronounced like a soft, voiced version of the guttural Scottish "ch" or merely manifested by lengthening the precedent vowel and assimilating any subsequent vowel (e.g., soğuk is pronounced "sew-OOK" or "SOAK") --except for the two highly irregularly spelled verbs döğmek and öğmek, where "ğ" is sounded like "v".

The effect of Kemal's introduction of an adapted Roman alphabet was a dramatic increase in literacy from Third World levels to nearly one hundred percent. It is critical to note that, for the first time, Turkish had an alphabet that was actually suited to the sounds of the language: the Arabic alphabet, which was thitherto in use, not only has no vowels (other than the consonants waw and yud, atop which the long 'u' and 'i' sounds, respectively, are occasionally multiplexed, and the alif, which can carry long medial 'a' or any initial vowel) but also lacked several vital consonants. The lack of discrimination among vowels is serviceable in Arabic (which sports few vowel sounds to begin with) but intolerable in Turkish, which features eight fundamental vowel sounds and a host of diphthongs based thereupon.

Grammar

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Turkish has an abundance of suffixes, but no native prefixes (apart from the reduplicating intensifier prefix as in beyaz="white", bembeyaz="very white", sıcak="hot", sımsıcak="very hot"). One word can have many suffixes. Suffixes can be used to create new words (see #Vocabulary) or to indicate the grammatical function of a word.

Turkish nouns can take endings indicating the person of a possessor. They can take case-endings, as in Latin. (The series of case-endings is the same for every noun, except for spelling changes owing to vowel harmony, and variation between voiced and unvoiced consonants.) "Vowel harmony" is the principle by which a native Turkish word generally incorporates either exclusively back vowels (a, ı, o, u) or exclusively front vowels (e, i, ö, ü). A notation such as -den means either -dan or -den, whichever promotes vowel harmony; a notation such as -iniz means either -ınız, -iniz, -unuz, or -ünüz, again with vowel harmony constituting the deciding factor.

Finally, they can take endings that give them a person and make them into sentences:

ev                           "house",
eviniz                  "your house",
evinizde             "at your house",
Evinizdeyiz  "We are at your house."

üzüm                                "grapes",
üzümümüz                        "our grapes",
üzümümüzü                    "of our grapes",
üzümümüzü mü?    "were those of our grapes?"

Turkish adjectives as such are not declined (though they can generally be used as nouns, in which case they are declined). Used attributively, they precede the nouns they modify.

A unique feature of Turkish and its Altaic brethren is its use of independent particles that express "existent" and "non-existent" and can be conjugated to express tense. Thus, while "var" and "yok" represent "exists" and "not exists," "vardı" and "yoktu" are the preterite of these, while "olacak" and "olmayacak" are the future. These lead to the most bizarre-looking (to a Western reader) sentential structures: e.g., in order to say, "My cat had no shoes," we form:

kedi + -m + -in ayak + kab(ı) + -lar + -ı + yok + -tu
(kedimin ayakkabıları yoktu)

which literally translates as, "cat-mine-of foot-cover(of)-plural-his non-existent-was."

Turkish verbs exhibit person. They can be made negative or impotential; they can also be made potential. Finally, Turkish verbs exhibit various distinctions of tense, mood, and aspect: a verb can be progressive, necessitative, aorist, future, inferential, present, past, conditional, imperative, or optative.

gel-                                                           "(to) come",
gelme-                                                     "not (to) come",
geleme-                                         "not (to) be able to come",
gelebil-                                            "(to) be able to come",
Gelememiş                     "She [or he] was apparently unable to come."
Gelememişti                               "She had not been able to come."
Gelememiştiniz                       "You (pl) had not been able to come."
Gelememiş miydiniz?                 "Have you (pl) not been able to come?"

All Turkish verbs are conjugated the same way, except for the irregular and defective verb i- (see Turkish copula), which can be used in compound forms:

Gelememişti = Gelememiş idi = Gelememiş + i- + -di

(The shortened form is called an enclitic.) Word order in Turkish is generally Subject Object Verb, as in Japanese and Latin, but not English. This can be seen in the following sentence from a newspaper (Cumhuriyet, 16 August 2005, p. 1). The sentence uses all noun cases except the genitive:

Türkiye'de modayı gazete sayfalarına taşıyan,
gazetemiz yazarlarından N. S. yaşamını yitirdi:

Türkiye'de    "in Turkey"        (locative) 
modayı        "fashion"          (accusative of moda)
gazete        "newspaper"        (nominative) 
sayfalarına   "to its pages"     (dative; sayfa "page", 
                                          sayfalar "pages",
                                          sayfaları "its pages")
taşıyan,      "carrying"         (present participle of taşı-)
gazetemiz     "our newspaper"    (nominative)gazete "newspaper"
yazarlarından "from its writers" (ablative; yazar "writer")
N. S.         [person's name]    (nominative)
yaşamını      "her life"         (accusative; yaşam "life")
yitirdi.      "lost"             (past tense of yitir- "lose" 
                                     from yit- "be lost")

"One of the writers of our newspaper, N. S., 
 who brought fashion to newspaper pages in Turkey, lost her life."

Vocabulary

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Turkish has the resources for building up many new words from old: from nouns:

göz         "eye",
gözlük      "eyeglasses"
gözlükçü    "someone who sells glasses"
gözlükçülük "the business of selling glasses" 

and from verbs:

yat-      "lie down"
yatır-    "lay down [that is, cause to lie down]"
yatırım   "instance of laying down: deposit, investment"
yatırımcı "depositor, investor".

Turkish vocabulary has gone through drastic changes in the history of the language. In the last sixty years, Turkish vocabulary has gone through changes that might take three centuries in another language.

Replaced old words

After the adoption of Islam as their religion some Arabic words (and a small number of Persian words) were widely used by the Turks. During the course of over six hundred years of the Ottoman Empire, the official language used by the empire was a mix of Turkish, Arabic and Persian.

After Atatürk founded the Republic of Turkey, he established the "Turkish Language Foundation" (Türk Dil Kurumu, TDK), which had an ideologically driven task to "purify" the language by replacing words of Arabic and Persian origin. This was part of a bigger effort to abolish the Arabic script in lieu of the Latin alphabet as part of a Westernization process. By banning the usage of these words in the press, the foundation succeeded in removing several hundred Arabic words from the language. While most of the words introduced to the language by TDK are new, TDK also suggested using old Turkish words which had not been used in the language for centuries.

Older and younger people in Turkey tend to express themselves with a different vocabulary due to this sudden change in the language. While the generations born before the 1940s tend to use the old Arabic origin words, the younger generations favor using new expressions. Some new words are not used as often as their old counterparts or have failed to convey the intrinsic meanings of their old equivalents. There is also a political significance to the old versus new debate in the Turkish language. Sectors of the population that are more religious also tend to use older words in the press or daily language. Therefore, the use of the Turkish language is also indicative of adoption/resistance to Atatürk's reforms which took place more than 70 years ago. In the last 20 years the "Turkish Language Foundation coined such words that they obviously seem and sound as "invented". Some of them are said to derive from old Turkic words, which are actually non existent.

However, many of the words derived by TDK, live together with their old counterparts. The different words –one originated from Old Turkic or derived by TDK; one originated from Arabic or Persian; and sometimes one originated from one of the European languages, especially French- having exactly the same literal meaning are used to express slightly different meanings, especially when speaking about abstract subjects. This is quite like the usage of Germanic words and the words originated from Latin languages in English.

Among some of the old words that were replaced are terms in geometry, directions (north, south, east, west), some of the months and many nouns and adjectives. Many new words have also been derived from verbs. Some examples of new and their old counterparts are:

Please see List of replaced loan words in Turkish for an extensive list of replaced old words and current loan words

The language in daily life

Turkish has many formulaic expressions for various social situations. Several of them feature Arabic verbal nouns together with the Turkish verb et- ("make, do").

A famous quotation and motto of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk:

• Yurtta sulh, cihanda sulh "Peace at home, peace in the world."

In the current language, this is

• Yurtta barış, dünyada barış.

References

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See also

• Swadesh list of Turkish words

External links

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• Turkish Phrase Book
• A discussion list for the learners of Turkish
• Online English Turkish Dictionary with 1,500,000 words and idioms
• Langtolang Turkish, English, French, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Rumanian, Swedish, Danish, Polish, Czech, Hungarian, Finnish, Esperanto, Swahili, Serbo_Croat Multilingual Dictionary
• Turkish-English and English-Turkish Online Dictionary
• Turkish to Turkish Dictionary.
• Turkish to Turkish Sign Language (TID) Visual Dictionary
• Learn Turkish language online.
• All free Turkish dictionaries
• Ethnologue report for Turkish
• onlineturkish.com
• Free online Turkish course written in German
• Turkish Dictionary from Webster's Dictionary
• Online Turkish-English/English-Turkish dictionary
• Turkish - English Dictionary
• A comprehensive and accurate Turkish-(English/French/Italian/and various other languages) dictionary
• Texas Tech University, Archive of Turkish Oral Narrative
• An Information site in Turkish Language
• WinMekMak - Turkish Verb Conjugator
• The best site for learning Turkish with detailed explanations
• Turkish dictionary available for use in various forms
• Let's try to learn Hungarian(Magyar) and Turkish! - with Japanese translation
• Learning Turkish
• Turkish Language Association Template:Tr li
• Vikisözlük (Turkish Wiktionary) Template:Tr liast:Turcu