Basics of Turkish Grammar

Word order, Turkish characters, vowel classes & variable vowels, HTML rendering

Word Order

Sentences are generally: Subject object(s) verb, so something like:

The word immediately before the verb is (usually) the most important word in the sentence and conveys the main point. The subject is often left out if it is a personal pronoun, since it can be derived from the verb conjugation.

Characters

Turkish uses some characters that aren't supported in basic HTML. Hopefully your browser can understand the following, some of which are rendered with Unicode!

Some other characters will sometimes appear with diacritical marks, especially in words Turkish borrowed from Arabic or Persian:

Note that your choice of browser may limit the accuracy of what is displayed on the screen or printed. Mozilla Firefox (at least version 1.5.0.5) and KDE Konqueror (at least version 3.5.3) display and print these characters fine. Microsoft Explorer is terribly insecure and should not be used for anything.

Vowel classes

Turkish vowels are said to be of two classes, front and back. But there is also the distinction of open versus close(d), and round versus unround. They can be arranged into a cube:

          a------o      back
         /|     /|     -----
  open  e------ö |    front
 -----  | |    | |
 close  | ı----|-u 
        |/     |/
        i------ü
           /
  unround / round

Variable Vowels and Vowel Harmony

Turkish has vowel harmony, meaning that a word usually has all vowels of a single class, front vs back, including those in suffixes added to reflect the part of speech.

Elementary Turkish uses the notation V² to indicate "the variable vowel e/a" which takes one value depending on vowel harmony, and the notation V⁴ to indicate "the four-variable vowel shown in the following table". More reasonably, Teach Yourself Turkish calls the first "e-type" and the second "i-type". Note the locations of V²/e-type and V⁴/i-type in the vowel cube. V²/e-type on the upper-left edge, V⁴/i-type on the bottom face:

          a------o      back
         /|     /|     -----
  open  e------ö |    front
 -----  | |    | |
 close  | ı----|-u 
        |/     |/
        i------ü
   unround / round

There are three rules of vowel harmony:

1. Back vowels are followed by back vowels, front vowels are followed by front vowels. Do not cross the back/front boundary.
2. Unrounded vowels are followed by unrounded vowels.
3. A rounded vowel may be followed by a mix of rounded closed and unrounded open vowels.

So:

• a or ı may be followed by a or ı
• o or u may be followed by u or a
• e or i may be followed by e or i
• ö or ü may be followed by ü or e

o -+------------+-> a <--> ı       ö -+------------+-> e <--> i
    `--> u --+--'                      `--> ü --+--'
         \___/                              \___/

Applying Variable Vowels

A word may not necessarily be internally consistent regarding vowel harmony — it may mix front and back vowels. For example, that word you learn early while riding Turkish buses and wondering what is advertised by so many signs along the highway: sigorta, or insurance. Or kitap, or book. However, much of Turkish grammar is formed by adding suffixes, and these suffixes usually follow vowel harmony with the preceding vowel (there are a few exceptions, suffixes of fixed form not following vowel harmony).

For example, the sign found in sleeper compartments of overnight trains, announcing a bed linen charge:
   Sayın yolcularımız: Ekspreslerimizde her gece için alınacak ...
   Dear passengers: in our express trains every night there will be purchased ...

Variable Consonants (section 5.2, pg 26)

Some consonants vary depending on whether a voiced or unvoiced consonant is needed. Voiced consonants follow other voiced consonants or vowels, unvoiced consonants follow unvoiced consonants (ç, f, h, k, p, s, ş, t). The pairs are t/d, p/b, and ç/c.

Also, a final k "softens" to ğ when a vowel is suffixed — köpek (dog) becomes köpeği when it is the direct object.

Optional Letters

Some letters are optional, vowel or consonant buffers between the existing stem so far and the next suffix.

© Bob Cromwell Jul 2008. Created with /bin/vi, hosted on OpenBSD with Apache.    Root password available here