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Turkish,
a member of the Turkic subdivision of the Altaic
language family and the successor of Ottoman-Turkish, is
a so-called agglutinative language. That means many
suffixes can be attached to words, such as case endings. |
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Some words may have
meanings,
that would correspond to long sentences in English for
example:
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İstanbul-lu-laş-tır-ama-dık-lar-ımız-dan
mı- sın?
Are you one of those, whom we could not make İstanbulian?'
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This is an exaggerated
example, but putting the suffixes
into the right order is one of the difficulties for
learners. But the good news: There is neither gender nor
definite articles in Turkish! And a European speaker
would be able to recognize a remarkable number of words
borrowed from French, Italian and English. Another peculiarity of
Turkish is its vowel harmony. Generally, the vowels of a
word must be either back or front, and the vowels of
suffixes attached to them usually adjust themselves.
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Ottoman-Turkish was written with the Arabic
script.
Changing the Arabic script was a much discussed issue in
the second half of the 19th century. The change into the
Latin alphabet came in 1928 along with many other
reforms in Turkey. Some letters had diacritics added,
such as 'ç' (/ch/) and the unique letter 'yumuşak
g' or the 'soft g'. The letters q, x and, w are not used
in the Modern Turkish alphabet.
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| Today, the standard high Turkish is referred to as
Istanbul Türkçesi, or Istanbul Turkish. Turkish is
spoken by the natives of Turkey as a mother tongue (~60
million people), and a significant number of Turks
living outside of Turkey (Cyprus, Balkans, Europe).
Other modern Turkic languages have many common features
with Turkey Turkish, be it in grammar or lexically.
Especially Gagauz (spoken in Moldova), Azeri (spoken in
Azerbaijan), and Turkmen (spoken in Iraq, Iran, Turkmenistan) are close to Turkey
Turkish. The mastery
of Turkey Turkish is certainly a key to learning other
Turkic languages as well.
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