Tuesday, December 7, 2010
Turkish Language
Speakers of Turkish
(This map shows where Turkic people usually reside in, note that most of them are in Central Asia, Khazakstan, Uzbekistan etc.)
The Turkish language belongs to the Turkic language family. There is approximately 125 million of Turkic speakers around the world. 65 million of these people can be found in Turkey, while the rest of these speakers can usually be found in the central Asian region or other foreign land which Turkish people migrate to.
How wide spread and common this language family is actually no surprise if people can recall Turkish history. One important historical fact is that: the Turks were originally from Central Asia before they migrated to Today’s Turkey. This also explains to us of the existence of Turkic speakers in today’s central Asian region. These speakers are usually from Kazakhstan, Kirgizstan, Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan. Another important fact that we must take into consideration is that during the Ottoman period, its rule extended from Central Asia all the way till Europe and the Middle East. Therefore, many Turkic people eventually settled down in these countries and still retained their linguistic properties of speaking Turkish.
How to communicate with the Turks
(The video above shows a Turkish girl speaking English)
In larger cities, foreigners need not worry as there are a significant number of Turkish people who can speak English, French and German. With this, many Turks would be happy to practice their linguistic skills with these foreigners.
If your first language is English, it is common to be approached by a passerby for a chat as they are eager to practice English with you.
However, bear in mind that it is also useful to learn a little of their language as they will be delighted that you made an effort to communicate with them.
The Turkish Language
(The above video teaches you how to recite some basic turkish words)
Turkish, like Finnish and Hungarian is an agglutinative language. This means when other words are added to the main word, the meaning of the word is changed. Let’s take the word Bayrak (flag) as an example. When the word “tar” adds to it, it becomes “Bayraktar” which means flag bearer. From here let’s add the word “Ogul” meaning son, to get the combination of the word “Bayraktaroglu” which means “the son of a flag bearer”. Easy isn’t it?
One may think that this in some way is similar to English. Like, adding words such as “care” and “less” together to form “careless”. However, the difference is that, using the method of agglutination, you can form one single sentence with just one word only.
Lets take glemiyorlardi as an example.
(As stated in culture shock Turkey)
Breaking gel-m-iyor-lar-di into pieces we have this:
Gel verb stem for “to come”
mi particle for negation
iyor particle for progressive tense
lar particle for third person plural
di particle for past tense
When we put all these words together, we have the sentence “They were not coming”, all in just one word! Saves a lot of your breath dosen't it?
However, the language is relatively hard for an English speaker to learn. This is due to the difference in terms of word order. English uses the word order in a sentence with: Subject + Verb + Object. Turkish, on the other hand uses the order of: Subject + Object + Verb. For example in an English sentence: I (subject) wrote (verb) a letter (object). For Turkish, it is Ben (I) (subject) mektup (letter) (object) yazdum (wrote) (verb). Therefore, at the same time, translating English to Turkish and vice versa is way more difficult as compared to translating French to English due to the difference in sentence structure.
Writing in Turkish is similar to writing in English. This is due to the fact that the Turks changed their language system to the Latin alphabet in the year of 1923. However, it is noticed that the alphabets “W” and “X” do not exist in their alphabet system at all. The reason being that they believe these alphabets are not really required in their pronunciation of their language. Therefore, they pronounce the alphabet “X” as in “ks” like “Taksi” which is the English equivalent of Taxi.
