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Sentences are generally: Subject object(s) verb, so something like:
| Turkish: | Köpek | suyu | içiyor. |
| English: | (The) dog | (the) water | is drinking. |
| Turkish: | Güç | bunda | kuvvetli. |
| English: | (The) Force | in this one | strong (is). |
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.
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!
| Char | Example | Explanation | HTML | LATEX | |||
| ç | Ç | çarşı | c with cedilla | ç | Ç | \c{c} | \c{C} |
| ğ | Ğ | dağı | g with a "u-shaped hat" | ğ | Ğ | \u{g} | \u{G} |
| İ | İstanbul | Dotted capital I | İ | \.{I} | |||
| ı | çarşı | undotted i | ı | {\i} | |||
| ö | Ö | görmek | o with an umlaut | ö | Ö | \"{o} | \"{O} |
| ş | Ş | dolmuş | s with cedilla | ş | Ş | \c{s} | \c{S} |
| ü | Ü | gülmek | u with an umlaut | ü | Ü | \"{u} | \"{U} |
Some other characters will sometimes appear with diacritical marks, especially in words Turkish borrowed from Arabic or Persian:
| Char | Example | Explanation | HTML | LATEX |
| â | lâle (tulip) | a with circumflex Pronounced like ya in gâ, kâ, lâ Lengthened otherwise |
â | \^{a} |
| î | millî (national) | i with circumflex Lengthened, appears in many adjectives borrowed from Arabic |
î | \^{\i} |
| û | sükût (silence) | u with circumflex Lengthened |
û | \^{u} |
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.
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
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:
So:
o -+------------+-> a <--> ı ö -+------------+-> e <--> i
`--> u --+--' `--> ü --+--'
\___/ \___/
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 ...
| yol | road | ekspres | express train | |
| yolcu | road-dealer, or really passenger | |||
| yolcular | passengers | ekspresler | express trains | |
| yolcularımız | our passengers | ekspreslerimiz | our express trains | |
| ekspreslerimizde | in our express trains |
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.
Some letters are optional, vowel or consonant buffers between the existing stem so far and the next suffix.
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