Basics of Turkish Grammar
Background & Introduction
Purpose and Better References
This is something I put together for my own use,
kind of a just-enough summary to be a study guide for Turkish grammar.
The first book I found was
Elementary Turkish, by Lewis V. Thomas,
Dover Publications,
1967, ISBN 0-486-25064-4.
A good book — if you want to try to teach yourself Turkish it seems like
the place to start, and it's commonly available and reasonably priced.
You can buy it from Amazon
or from
Dover (http://www.doverpublications.com/).
I more recently found Turkish Grammar, by G. L. Lewis,
Oxford University Press, 1991, ISBN 0-19-815838-6.
It would be the second grammar book to read.
It seems like a far better book to me now,
but it would be a difficult place to start.
The Turkish language is highly organized
and lends itself to the construction of tables.
Turkish appeals to computer geeks who figure that anything defined
by a rigid grammar can be wrestled to the ground given enough organization
(Although figuring out how
görüştürülmek
means to be made to converse with one another is non-trivial).
It's also pretty handy if you worry that you might get randomly teleported
to some random spot on the surface of the Earth.
You could travel overland from the Aegean Sea to the Great Wall of China,
and speak Turkish (or at least some Turkic language or dialect)
to the locals the entire way.
Mind you, Spanish also covers a lot of ground,
and Chinese includes a lot of people.
But Turkish has practical application way beyond languages like
like Estonian or Basque
or Esperanto.
Background of Turkish
Turkish is an agglutinative language, a big word meaning that words
have suffixes, possibly several, appended to reflect case and number
(for nouns and pronouns) or conjugation (for verbs).
So, these pages are mostly collections of tables of suffixes,
particularly for the verbs.
I've been told that the technical term is actually morphotactics.
This means that this collection of pages might be somewhat mislabeled.
Yes, there is some discussion of grammar here — topics like
word order and relationships between words or phrases of a sentence,
the syntax of the language.
But the bulk of the material is about inflection — how
words are modified when they play different roles.
Inflection includes conjugation of verbs
(I run,
I am running,
I was running,
I ran,
I had run,
and so on)
and inflection of nouns and pronouns
(I,
me,
my,
mine,
and so on, and note that English mostly leaves nouns uninflected).
Other than a few quirky characters, like that undotted "ı",
Turkish is fairly straightforward.
Like Russian:
-
There are no definite versus indefinite articles to mix up.
-
When discussing states of existance or character,
verbs aren't even needed.
-
Words are spelled phonetically — other than which syllable
to stress, you know how to pronounce a previously unseen word.
-
OK, nothing is perfect, Russian and Turkish orthography
included.
Written Turkish may leave out diacritical marks,
and G.L. Lewis describes many regional quirks and
Persian and Arabic leftovers.
And in Russian, as someone reminded me:
"Vowel reduction causes native speakers to mix up
е, и, and я.
Consonant assimilation is not reflected in written
language in most cases.
In words like
чувство
and
бездна,
not all letters are pronounced."
Plus,
его
is pronounced as if it were spelled
ево,
and so on.
But both are far more phonetic than English!
Other advantages of Turkish:
-
There are are no irregular verbs (except a slightly irregular
verb "to be", a verb which seems to be irregular in
every language).
-
There are
no irregular nouns
(except a slightly irregular word su for "water").
-
There is no gender.
-
The third person singular pronoun o means
"he", "she", and "it" equally.
So, all whining politically correct nitwits
should learn Turkish immediately and use it exclusively.
-
There is no distinction between adjectives and adverbs — one word
serves both purposes.
No good versus well mixups.
There are a few minor disadvantages and difficulties:
-
Turkish is not Indo-European, so don't expect most words
to even vaguely resemble words from European languages.
Except of course for:
-
The large number of words borrowed from European languages,
largely French, e.g.
jandarma, trengar, otogar, etc.
-
The words European languages borrowed from Turkish,
especially Russian borrowing from various Turkic languages
from its central Asian empire.
And then there's Russian
киоск,
which the Russians got from the French kiosk,
which the French got from the Turkish kösk.
-
The large number of words borrowed from Arabic by
both European languages and Turkish.
Semantics is a very different (and very difficult!) problem.
According to my dictionary, the Turkish word vurgun means:
-
adj in love with
-
noun profiteering
-
noun the bends (as in the pressure-related ailment)
-
Words can get awfully long, with all the meaning buried in the
sequence of suffixes piled together in a particular order.
One word of warning — there are undoubtedly many mistakes in the following.
If you spot any, please send me a note so I can correct this!
My address is at the bottom of the page.
Other good books:
-
Teach Yourself Turkish,
A. Ç. Pollard and D. Pollard,
NTC, 1996, ISBN 0-8442-3715-9,
also available from Amazon.
It also has a web site:
http://www.practicalturkish.com/
-
One recommended via e-mail, but I can't find any more about it:
"Another excellent book is "Turkish in Three Months".
It really should be titled "Turkish Suffixes" as it is
organized by suffix.
While the index should be 6 pages instead of 3,
it is a great reference book.
Available from Hugo in the UK."
Instructional web sites
Turkish natural-language processsing library Zemberek
On-line Turkish-English dictionaries
Web pages to test your reading skills
-
Fortunately, newspaper articles are written to grade-school
reading levels.
Unfortunately, it seems that Turkish grade-school kids are
far smarter than me.
Try these:
-
If you get good, here is a page with short stories and their
English translations:
http://www.ottomania.dk/turktexts.html
Music and dialog for listening
-
Bayrak FM, Ankara, 98 MHz FM.
http://brt.emu.edu.tr/bayrakfm.ram
-
Bayrak Radyo 1, Ankara, 91 MHz FM.
http://brt.emu.edu.tr/bayrak1.ram
-
Capitol Radio, Ankara, 99.5 MHz FM.
http://www.capitalradio.com.tr/capital.ram
-
ITU Radyo, Istanbul, 103.8 MHz FM.
http://radyo.itu.edu.tr:7070/ramgen/live.rm
-
TGRT FM, Istanbul, 93 MHz FM.
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Turkish stations sending audio across the Internet can also be found at:
