Calling all language lovers!

[Gauchita]

I'll shamelessly plug a friend's blog here because it's great!

If you're interested in language, etymology, linguistics, etc, head this way.

She's an etymology addict (and doesn't mind me saying so ) and is teaching the rest of us a lot, so thank you Alex

alexpolistigers.wordpress.com/

I think you would find it fascinating. Turkish is closer to Japanese than any European language. Nouns and even pronouns have no gender.

There is extensive agglutination through which new words are formed and entire sentences can be said in a single (very long) word:

Gel = Come
Gelme = Don't come
Gelmedin = You didn't come
Gelmemissin = I heard that you didn't come
Gelmistin = You had come
Gelmeseydin = If you had not come
Gelmeyecektin = You were not going to come
Gelmemeliydin = You shouldn't have come

There is also strict vowel harmony whereby a word will either have only A, O, U, I ("i without a dot") or it will only have E, Ö, Ü, i. This makes it easy to spot foreign words like televizyon (o can't follow e and i) or valiz (i can't follow a).

When English expat friends in France talk about how difficult, how different French is compared to English, I smile and nod

At the risk of boring everyone to tears, here is another interesting thing about Turkish: it is written phonetically - each letter is pronounced in only one way and there are no letter groups (i.e. if you can recite the alphabet, you can read a book in Turkish even if you don't understand a single word). This was intentionally done when a modified Latin Alphabet was adopted in 1928.

This also means that there is very little variation in how educated people speak Turkish. Regional variations are unimportant compared to countries like UK and France and are mainly about the different terms used rather than different pronunciations.

The reason why your Turkish neighbours speak differently is probably that the 1st generation immigrants in their families had little to no formal education so they never learned how each letter is to be pronounced, and their descendants learned from them so have the same "dialect".

Cote You are right, I am already fascinated!

I have heard of some Hungarian agglutination, but not to the extent you describe in your post. I really am tempted to take a course, it sounds so interesting! Do verbs not need a separate subject pronoun in general, as it is included in a suffix or is part of the way the word is conjugated?

Incidentally, I find that funny about English speakers of French, too. I find it one of the easiest languages I have looked at!

Regarding the Turkish speakers near me - they are the Turkish speaking minority in northern Greece. Some of them will have gone to the Turkish speaking school, but a lot of them go to the Greek medium schools - there are some in my children's classes. I often chat to one of the mums in the playground at pick-up time. She was the one who told me that their Turkish is a bit different.

A separate subject pronoun is not needed unless you are emphasising it ("I was the one who did it") because it is included in the conjugation of the verb: "n" at the end of the words below mean "you", for example. Replace it with "m" and it would mean "I".

Sorry, I misunderstood re your neighbours. I thought automatically of the immigrant families in the UK, many of whose speech I struggle to understand. I don't know about the Turkish spoken in Greece. Is it Karamanlidika?

Some of them will belong to the Karamanlidika group, I expect, but this term is usually used for Turkish speaking Christians (at least in Greece, it is). There are also a lot of Turkish speaking Muslims - I don't know enough about Turkish to be able to tell if their language is in any way different. I expect that a large number at least will speak the same Karamanlidika as their Christian neighbours.

Actually, I am curious about this now. I will ask the friendly mum when I see her again - she is from the Muslim community.

English speakers complaining about learning a non-tonal SVO language that uses the same alphabet always get from me.

I do find it fascinating that Turkish should use an "m" sound for the first person singular. This seems to be a feature of so many languages, from many language groups. Look at English me, my, French me, moi, mon, Italian me, mio, Greek mou, emena, conjugation -mai, the list goes on and on. -m is a sound often associated with the first person.

Still reading...Turkish sounds fascinating!
What's a SVO language?

SVO = Subject Verb Object - it refers to the usual word order.

English falls into this category - we only invert in special circumstances - generally either for questions or standardised expressions (eg "be that as it may"). And even questions don't onvert the main verb, it's an auxillary.

Incidentally, Cote you couldn't tell me the Turkish equivalent of the expression "great minds think alike"? I have been making notes on it, I'd like to write a post on this expression

Yes, sorry. If you think about all the languages most English people complain about (French, German, Spanish), you can translate nearly word for word most of the time, and can at least sound out words and have a stab at spelling.

I pretty much fell over trying to learn Greek

Really?? I've always thought of Greek as quite easy, compared to Welsh, for example! Once you've learnt the alphabet and the main conjugations and declensions, it all follows the same pattern!

I got stuck on the alphabet to be honest. I am a very visual learner with a stupidly fast reading speed, so slowing down to reading one letter at a time stalled me completely.

Learning IPA (the international phonetic alphabet) to do my degree was bad enough.

"great minds think alike"

I guess that would be "Aklin yolu birdir", which is not easy to translate in a meaningful way but is something like "There is only one rational/intelligent way (and we have both found it)".

alexpoli - Would you be interested in looking at the etymology of words common to Greek & Turkish? I have often wondered about names of food & dishes, for example.

"Domates" = Tomato in Turkish, but clearly not a TR word since (1) e can't follow o & a due to wowed harmony, and (2) it is so similar to the words in European languages.

Yoghurt, on the other hand is a TR word that was imported into European languages (Several Greek friends found this upsetting, for some reason. They seemed to think that yoghurt is a Greek invention.).

Sarma and dolma are TR words meaning "wrapped" and "filled" so I would think that sarmades and dolmades are imported into Greek from Turkish. I'm not sure about the origin of musakka/moussaka. Possibly Arabic?

Oooh, I would love to look at this, Cote! I have no hang-ups as to who has the most ancient form of the word, being neither Greek nor Turkish I know what it is like, though! I have heard it all.

"tomato" is one that i know anyway - it comes from Nahuatl.

You are probably right about sarmades/ dolmades. I will look into some of the others! This looks like a fascinating subject. I'll probably need some time to delve into it properly, though.

Cote Can you tell me some other words in Turkish that start in the same way as "yogurt", or might possible be in the same group/ same roots? What is Turkish for "yeast"? Maybe "knead"? I'm asking because I have found two schools of thought on the word, and other Turkish words stemming from the same base would strengthen the case for a Turkish origin. Some Greek linguists claim that it is a reverse-loan from ancient Greek. I shall do some more research on this!

I have found yoğurmak and yoğun in Turkish listed as being from the same root as "yogurt", and to be honest this seems to me more likely than the conjecture that it comes from the ancient Greek root "iartos", as proposed by some scholars.

I shall look into some other words now, that's enough yogurt for one day!

My Turkish letters didn't work on MN! Never mind, it was "yogurmak" and "yogun", with a little accent over the "g"

You are right, Cote about musakka/moussaka - it's from Arabic "musaqqan".

Baklavas/baklava is from Arabic "bakla"

Kadayif/ kantaifi is from Arabic qata'if

Meze/ mezes is from Farsi "maza", meaning "taste, aroma"

Is there really any doubt re the origin of the word "yogurt"? Open any dictionary and you will see the letters TR next to it, meaning it comes from Turkish.

Yogurmak = to knead
Yogun = dense, thick

Interesting tidbit: You don't see two consonants at the end of a word in Turkish. The one exception is 'rt', for example in:

Dört = Four
Abart = Exaggerate
Yurt = Portable tent-like swelling, and in recent use, one's homeland

... and of course Yogurt

I'm actually pretty sure re sarmades/dolmades:

Sar = Wrap
Sarmak = To wrap
Sarilmak = To hug
Sarmasik = Creeping plant (hugging the wall/trellis)
... and Sarma = Something that has been wrapped

Dol = Be filled
Dolmak = To be filled
Doldur = Fill
Doldurmak = To fill
Dolu = Full
... and Dolma = Something that has been filled

Anyway, should we ask for this thread to be moved to Language/Bilingualism? Not sure if anyone else is interested but I'd be sad to see it disappear.

Re "yogurt" - I thought it was pretty well decided too, but apparently some scholars are trying to make out that it's from the ancient Greek "iartos". Clutching at straws, in my opinion.

Yes, of course, you are right about sarmades/ dolmades. I was just looking to see if "lachano" was Turkish too - in this area "lachanodolmades" and "lachanosarmas" are very popular.

Is the consonant thing you mention to do with the vowel harmony and overall music of Turkish? It's an interesting point.

What is the Turkish word for "music", just out of curiosity?