Turkish language
Encyclopedia : T : TU : TUR : Turkish language
Turkish (Türkçe) is a Turkic language spoken natively in Turkey, Cyprus, Bulgaria, Greece, Macedonia and other countries of the former Ottoman Empire, as well as by several million emigrants in the European Union. The number of native speakers is uncertain, primarily due to a lack of minority language data from Turkey. The figure of 73 million used here assumes that Turkish is the mother tongue of 80% of Turkey's population. However, the vast majority of the linguistic minorities in Turkey are bilingual, speaking Turkish as a second language to levels of native fluency.
It sometimes seize with other Turkic languages, see also Azerbaijani, Turkmen, Uzbek, Kazakh, Kyrgyz There is a high degree of mutual intelligibility between Turkish and other Oghuz languages such as Azeri, Turkmen, and Qashqai. If these are counted together as "Turkish", the number of native speakers is 100 million, and the total number including second-language speakers is around 125 million.
Classification
Turkish is a member of the Turkish family of languages, which includes Gagauz and Khorasani 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 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, Syria, Greece (especially in Western Thrace) and Israel (by Turkish Jews). More than two million Turkish speaking people live in Germany, and significant Turkish speaking communities in Austria, Belgium, France, the Netherlands, Switzerland and the United Kingdom.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
As a result of the original nationalist idea of establishing the İstanbul dialect of Turkish as the standard, dialectology remains as a highly immature discipline in Turkey. The standard language of Turkish is essentially the Ottoman Turkish language as written in the Latin alphabet and with an abundance of neologisms added. The preferred colloquial form is named İstanbul Türkçesi as manifested in the works of prominent pan-Turkists like Ziya Gökalp (Güzel dil, Türkçe bize / Başka dil, gece bize. / İstanbul konuşması / En saf, en ince bize.) and İsmail Gaspıralı. Academically, Turkish dialects are often referred to as ağız or şive, leading to ambiguity with the linguistic concept of accent. Turkish still lacks a comprehensive atlas of dialects and assimilation into official Turkish is influential.The main dialects of Turkish include:
- Rumelice (spoken by muhajirs from Rumelia) includes peculiar dialects of Dinler and Adakale,
- Kıbrıs (spoken in Cyprus),
- Edirne (spoken in Edirne),
- Doğu (spoken in Eastern Turkey) has dialect continuum with Azerbaijani in some areas,
- Karadeniz (spoken in the Eastern Black Sea region) is represented primarily by Trabzon dialect,
- Ege (spoken in the Aegean region) has extension to Antalya,
- Güneydoğu (spoken in the South, to the east of Mersin),
- Orta Anadolu (spoken in the Middle Anatolian region),
- Kastamonu (spoken in Kastamonu and vicinity),
- Karamanlıca (spoken in Greece, where it is also named Kαραμανλήδικα) was the literary standard for Karamanlides.
Sounds
One characteristic feature of Turkish is vowel harmony, meaning that a 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]. Also, in the use of proper names, the stress is transferred to the syllable before the last (e.g. Istánbul), although there are exceptions to this (e.g. Ánkara).Consonants
| Bilabial | Labio-dental | Dental | Alveolar | Post-alveolar | Palatal | Velar | Glottal | |||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Plosives | p | b | t | d | c | k | g | |||||||||
| Nasals | m | n | ||||||||||||||
| Fricatives | f | v | s | z | h | |||||||||||
| Affricates | ||||||||||||||||
| Tap | ɾ | |||||||||||||||
| Approximant | j | |||||||||||||||
| Lateralapproximants | ɫ | l | ||||||||||||||
The phoneme /ɣ/ 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
Writing system
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The sounds of the individual letters exhibit few surprises for English speakers. Following International Phonetic Alphabet conventions on phonetic transcription, angle brackets < > here are used to enclose written letters, and brackets [ ] are used to enclose symbols that represent the sounds. Most writing-sound correspondences can be predicted by English speakers, with the following exceptions. The
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 hitherto in use, commonly shows only three different values for vowels (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.
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:
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:
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.
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 wordsGrammar
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.ev "house",
evler "the houses",
evin "your house",
eviniz "your house", (plural or respect)
evim "my house",
evimde "at my house",
evinde "at your house",
evinizde "at your house", (plural or respect)
evimizde "at our house",
Evindeyim "I am at your house."
Evinizdeyim "I am at your house." (plural or respect)
Evindeyiz "We are at your house."
Evinizdeyiz "We are at your house." (plural or respect)
Evimizdeyiz "We are at our house."
üzüm "grape",
üzümüm "my grape",
üzümün "your grape",
üzümümüz "our grape",
üzümünüz "your grape", (plural or respect)
üzümümüzü "of our grape",
üzümümüzü mü? "were those of our grape?"
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.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."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
Turkish has the resources for building up many new words from old: from nouns:
göz "eye",
gözlük "eyeglasses"
gözlükçü "someone who sells eyeglasses"
gözlükçülük "the business of selling eyeglasses"
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. Purification
After the adoption of Islam as their religion, a large number of Arabic and 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.
Old word
New Turkish word
English meaning
Remarks
müselles
üçgen
triangle
derived from the noun üç, which means "three"
tayyare
uçak
airplane
derived from the verb uçmak, which means "to fly"
nispet
oran
ratio
the old word is still used in the language today together with the new one
şimal
kuzey
north
derived from the Old Turkic noun kuz, which means “cold and dark place”
Teşrini-evvel
Ekim
October
the noun ekim means “the action of planting”, referring to the planting of cereal seeds in autumn, which is widespread in Turkey
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:
literal translation
meaning (if different)
Merhaba
Welcome (Arabic)
Hello
Alo
Hello (from French "allô")
(on the telephone: Hello or Are you still there?)
Efendim
My lord
1. Hello (answering the telephone); 2. Sir/Madam (a polite way to address any person, male or female, married or single); 3. Excuse me, could you say that again?
Günaydın
[The] day [is] bright
Good morning
İyi günler
Good days
Good day
İyi akşamlar
Good evenings
Good evening
İyi geceler
Good nights
Good night
Evet
Yes
Hayır
No
Belki
Maybe
Hoş geldiniz
You came well
Welcome
Hoş bulduk
We found [it] well
We are (or I am) glad to be here
Nasılsın?
How are you (sing.)?
How are you? (familiar)
Nasılsınız?
How are you (pl.)?
How are you? (respectful, or plural)
İyiyim; siz nasılsınız?
I'm fine; how are you?
Ben de iyiyim
I too am fine
I am fine too
Affedersiniz
You make [a] forgiving
Excuse me
Lütfen
Please
Teşekkür ederim
I make [a] thanking
Thank you
Bir şey değil
It is nothing
You're welcome
Rica ederim
I make [a] requesting
Don't mention it; You're welcome; Don't say such bad things of yourself; Don't say such good things of me
Estağfurullah
I seek God's forgiveness (common Muslim prayer)
(similar to rica ederim)
Geçmiş olsun
May [it] be passed
Get well soon (said to somebody in any kind of difficulty, not just sickness; or to somebody who has just come through difficulty)
Başınız sağ olsun
May your head be healthy
My Condolences (said to somebody in mourning)
Elinize sağlık
Health to your hand
(said to praise the person that made this delicious food or other good thing)
Afiyet olsun
May [it] be healthy
bon appétit (good appetite)
Kolay gelsin
May [it] come easy
(said to somebody working)
Güle güle kullanın
Use [it] smiling
(said to somebody with a new possession)
Sıhhatler olsun
May [it] be healthy
(said to somebody who has bathed or had a shave or haircut)
Hoşçakal(ın)
Stay nice
"So long" or "Cheerio" (said to the person staying behind)
Güle güle
[Go] smiling
Good bye (said to somebody departing)
Allah'a ısmarladık
We commended [you] to God
Good bye [said to the person staying behind(for a long time)] or Adieu in French
In the current language, this is
References
See also
External links