Language Information
Until 1928, Turkish was written using a
modified version of the Arabic alphabet, but use of the Arabic alphabet was
outlawed after the Latin alphabet was introduced.
Turkish alphabet consists of 29
letters - 8 vowels and 21 consonants. Each letter has exactly one associated
sound.
Latin alphabet for Turkish
Notes
- The letter
Ğ is silent and makes the vowels before it long when it appears at
the end of a word or before a consonant. When it appears between vowels it
is either silent or is pronounced [y]
- The letters
Q, X and W are not included in the official Turkish alphabet, but are used
in foreign names.
One of the
characteristic features of Turkish is the vowel harmony (A language is said to
possess vowel harmony when it
has a phonological rule that requires all vowels in a word to belong to a
single class. Turkish has a 3-dimensional vowel harmony system, where vowels
are characterized by three features: front, high and rounded.) Compound words
are considered separate words with respect to vowel harmony: vowels do not have
to harmonize between members of the compound. In addition, vowel harmony does
not apply for loanwords and some invariant suffixes; there are also a few
native Turkish words that do not follow the rule.
|
|
|
Front |
Back |
|
High |
Unrounded |
i |
ü |
|
Rounded |
y |
u |
|
|
Low |
Unrounded |
e |
a |
|
Rounded |
ö |
o |
Stress is usually on the last syllable, with the exception of some suffix
combinations and few words.
The so-called
"soft g", "ğ" in Turkish orthography, represents the
phoneme /ɣ/ and is pronounced as a front-velar or palatal approximant between front
vowels. When it is word-final or followed by a consonant it becomes a
lengthening of the previous vowel an in all other context not pronounced at
all.
Turkish is known
for having an abundance of suffixes and it has no prefixes (some Arabic loan
words have their own prefixes, but those are the common prefixes of Arabic).
There can be up to four or five suffixes attached to one word at the same time.
Suffixes can derive words and also establish the tense meanings. In Turkish,
all verbs are regular. Word order in Turkish is Subject-Object-Verb similar to
Japanese and Latin, but unlike English.
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