Your ideas about Turkish which has over 150 million speakers

Joey   Sat Sep 09, 2006 12:23 pm GMT
If the illusion of been part of the EU can better Turkey and the goverment dosn't just sit on it's behind Turkey can only benefit from this situation.
Joey   Sat Sep 09, 2006 1:30 pm GMT
correction

been = being
Adam   Sun Sep 10, 2006 6:55 pm GMT
Turkish, like English (and the majority of the world's languages), has no grammatical gender.


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) is the literary standard for Karamanlides.


Like Finnish, it is an "aggutinative" language, sticking many suffixes together to form a word -


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:

Turkish - English


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

Again, it's simuilar to Finnish.



Possession is expressed by means of constructions based on verbs meaninmg "to exist" and "to not exist". 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."


There are no definite articles in Turkish.


wikipedia.org
a.p.a.m.   Sun Sep 10, 2006 7:51 pm GMT
Turkish is similar to Finnish, as you say. Both languages have Asian roots , no doubt.
Guest   Mon Sep 11, 2006 4:54 pm GMT
<<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.>>

Usually, -dEn is used to designate the ending which can be -den or -dan according to vowel harmony in a certain word and -InIz is used to designate that it can be either -ınız, -iniz, -unuz, or -ünüz according to the last vowal of the word.