Newsgroups: soc.culture.turkish,sci.lang
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From: deb5@ellis.uchicago.edu (Daniel von Brighoff)
Subject: Re: Is Turkish a new language?
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References: <D3q22K.42H@news.dlr.de> <D3y2vv.oE@Virginia.EDU> <1995Feb16.012953.15511@Princeton.EDU>
Date: Fri, 24 Feb 1995 06:26:16 GMT
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In article <1995Feb16.012953.15511@Princeton.EDU>,
Christopher Bradford Stone <cbstone@tucson.princeton.edu> wrote:
>No, in fact Turkish is a very old language.  It belongs to the 
>Ural-Altaic family of languages and is purportedly rather difficult to 
>learn -- certainly much more so than Indo-European languages.  It makes 
>extensive use of prefixes and suffixes, and its word order is exceeding 
>different from that of both Indo-European languages and Semitic languages.

What makes you say this?  I admit that my experience with Turkish is
limited, but it doesn't seem very difficult to learn at all.  Mandarin
has given me more headaches than any so-called "Altaic" language ever
has.

Turkish morphology is a snap compared to that of several IE languages,
particularly the more heavily inflected ones, like Russian.  Some
specific examples:

Plural--Turkish adds -lar (after back vowels) or -ler (after front 
	vowels)

ev "house" evler "houses"
kIz "girl" kIzlar
g"oz "eye" g"ozler

	Russian has at least six distinct endings in the nominative
case alone; each gender (Russian has three) has at least two different
ways of forming the nominative plural.  E.g.:

vid "appearance" vidy
rebjonok "child" rebjata
sluchaj "case" sluchai
profil' "profile" profili

All these words are masculine and there are five more cases, each with 
a distinct ending in singular and plural.

Turkish, or course, has no noun cases, just suffixes which mark similar
distinctions, but with a lot less variance.  The only rules one has to
learn are basically phonological:  vowel harmony, consonant devoicing,
etc.  In Russian, it's memorising declensions until your head's full.
Graanted, the Slavic verb is simpler, but that's small comfort.

For people with no experience with noun inflection (i.e. Chinese
speakers), I'm sure Turkish is easier than most IE languages 
(English is something of an exception, being less inflected than all 
other languages in the family).

-- 
	 Daniel "Da" von Brighoff    /\          Dilettanten
	(deb5@midway.uchicago.edu)  /__\         erhebt Euch
				   /____\      gegen die Kunst!
