Turkish Language
Arapça bir dil, Farsça bir şekerleme, Türkçe ise bir
sanattır
Arabic is a language, Persian is a sweetmeat, and
Turkish is an art
(Old Persian proverb)
Turkish is the native tongue of 90 percent of the population in Turkey and is a language of Central Asian
origin. It is related to many other Turkic languages such as Azerbaijani,
Türkmen, Uzbek,
Kazakh, Kirghiz, and Uygur, which are spoken across a vast area of Asia ranging
from the Caucasus mountains to the Western part of China. Turkish has a very regular structure, based upon suffixation, which
differentiates it sharply from the majority of European languages, and also from
both Arabic and Persian. From the 14th century until the First World War,
Turkish was the official language of the Ottoman empire, which
at its height dominated the whole of the Balkans and most of the Middle East.
During this period, the religious authority of Arabic and the literary influence
of Persian led to the large-scale importation of vocabulary and even grammatical
elements from both these languages, and Turkish continued to be written in the
Arabic script until the adoption of the Latin alphabet in 1928. Thereafter, a
radical 'purification' took place, which has removed all but a small,
well-assimilated residue of the Arabic and Persian loanwords.
Turkish is located among the ending languages in the world
tongue classification. The root of the words are not altered while the word
structure and declination. The declinations and building of the words are
executed by the affixes. The order of the words and affixes are as "root +
building affix + declination affix" . There are 29 letters in Turkish
language in the Republic period Latin letters. ç,ğ,
ş, ö, ū, ı letters are
peculiar to Turkish alphabet.
Specific difficulties
when learning Turkish are the agglutinative structure, the
sometimes reverse
order of words, and the abundance of synonyms. An example of the richness of the
Turkish vocabulary is the
English word activity. This can be translated in either faaliyet
(Arabic origin), etkinlik (Turkish), or aktivite (French).
An example of the agglutinative nature by the use of suffixes is the sentence we
are in your houses. This is translated in Turkish by the single word evlerinizdeyiz,
which is formed by the root ev (house) + -ler (plural) + -iniz (possessive
suffix meaning your) + -de (locative meaning in or at) + -yiz (meaning
we are). Another typical aspect of Turkish is the vocal harmony, compare for
instance evlerinizdeyiz wtih parklarınızdayız,
meaning we are in your parks.
Here are some useful links for learning Turkish:
