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The Origins of Turkish
The Origins of Turkish
The Turkish Language originated in The Altai Mountain Range in Northern Siberia centuries ago.
For this reason it is called an Altaic Language.
Turkish is spoken from the borders of Greece into the hinterland of Western China.
While the Ottoman Empire flourished Turkish was spoken from Vienna to Arabia, Egypt and Northern Africa.
As nomads expanded further into Asia Minor they brought their language to Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Azerbaijan and Turkic countries.
Many of these languages are mutually intelligible although vocabulary usage, spelling and alphabet may differ.
They all exhibit the same grammatical structure of agglutination and vowel harmony.
The Turkish vocabulary contains many words from Arabic, Persian and European languages.
These imported words follow the basic grammar and vowel harmony of native Turkish.
An Overview of The Turkish Language.
- Nouns are suffixed with possessor and the motion or location words are then added.
- These suffixes show
motion towards, motion from, static locationof that object.
- Suffixes change spelling to harmonze with the parent word.
- Similarly a consonants may change for ease of pronunciation.
- Suffixes are added verb stems to indicate its positive or negative form.
- Further suffixes are then added for tense and person.
- Further moods
may, might, can, can't, mustare added thus producing new verbs.
- There is no definite article “the” as a subject.
- There is a specifier “the” as a direct object suffix.
- There are no gender forms (no “le” or “la” as in French) in Turkish.
- One single word is used for “he, she, it”
- Adjectives describe their noun and remain in their basic form.
- There being no gender thus no gender agreement is required.
- The sentence form is SOV Subject, Object, Verb.
The Structure of Turkish.
Turkish is not a Classical Structured Language.
Turkish grammar is not looked on by the Turks themselves as a Classical Structured Language.
Turkish has its own grammar rules which are not based on the Classical System as those in Latin or Greek.
Most Turkish grammars for foreigners are written by linguists and grammarians.
Usually authored in consort with a Turkish national.
They tend to use a classical language framework.
Consequently most grammars are peppered with such classic terms as accusative, dative, locative and ablativetogether with such tenses and moods as aorist, subjunctive.