Basics of Turkish Grammar Word Order & Orthography

http://www.cromwell-intl.com/turkish/orthography.html

www.Grammarly.com/Grammar_Check

Ads by Google

To the main Turkish grammar page Back to background & introduction S kip forward to pronouns, nouns, possession, adjectives, adverbs, conjunctions

Basics of Turkish Grammar

The M evlana Shrine in Konya. See my travel pages for many more pictures.

Word order, Turkish characters, vowel harmony & variable vowels, HTML rendering

Word Order
Sentences are generally: Subject object(s) verb, so something like: Turkish: English: Turkish: Kpek G suyu bunda iiyor. kuvvetli.

(The) dog (the) water is drinking.

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.
www.Grammarly.com/Grammar_Checker Ads by Google

That's just a very simple statement. See a later page in this series for more details on worder order.

Characters
Turkish uses some characters that aren't supported in basic HTM L. Hopefully your browser can understand the following, some of which are rendered with Unicode!
1 of 5 19/07/10 17:49

Basics of Turkish Grammar Word Order & Orthography

http://www.cromwell-intl.com/turkish/orthography.html

Turkish Characters Used on This Page Char Example ar da ar Explanation c with cedilla g with a "u-shaped hat" undotted i HTML LATE X

ç Ç \c{c} \c{C} ğ Ğ \u{g} \u{G} İ ı ö Ö \.{I} {\i} \"{o} \"{O}

stanbul Dotted capital I grmek o with an umlaut dolmu s with cedilla glmek u with an umlaut

ş Ş \c{s} \c{S} ü Ü \"{u} \"{U}

Some other characters will sometimes appear with diacritical marks, especially in words Turkish borrowed from Arabic or Persian: Other Characters Found in Turkish Char Example lle (tulip) Explanation a with circumflex Pronounced like ya in g, k, l Lengthened otherwise HTML LATE X
â \^{a}

i with circumflex mill (national) Lengthened, appears in many adjectives borrowed from Arabic skt (silence) u with circumflex Lengthened

î

\^{\i}

û

\^{u}

Note that your choice of browser may limit the accuracy of what is displayed on the screen or printed. M ozilla Firefox and KDE Konqueror display and print these characters fine. M icrosoft Explorer is terribly insecure and should not be used for anything.

Vowel harmony

2 of 5

19/07/10 17:49

Basics of Turkish Grammar Word Order & Orthography

http://www.cromwell-intl.com/turkish/orthography.html

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 /| /| open e------ | ----- | | | | close | ----|-u |/ |/ i------ / unround / round back ----front

Firefox users may find that "monospace" isn't really a constant-width font, and Courier works much better for ASCII art.

Variable Vowels and Vowel Harmony

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". M ore 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 /| /| open e------ | ----- | | | | close | ----|-u |/ |/ i------ unround / round back ----front

There are three rules of vowel harmony: 1. Back vowels are followed by back vowels, front vowels are followed by front vowels. Do not cross the back/front boundary. 2. Unrounded vowels are followed by unrounded vowels. 3. A rounded vowel may be followed by a mix of rounded closed and unrounded open vowels. So: a or may be followed by a or o or u may be followed by u or a e or i may be followed by e or i or may be followed by or e
o -+------------+-> a <--> \--> u --+--/ \___/ -+------------+-> e <--> i \--> --+--/ \___/

Applying Variable Vowels

3 of 5

19/07/10 17:49

Basics of Turkish Grammar Word Order & Orthography

http://www.cromwell-intl.com/turkish/orthography.html
Ads by Google
Turkish Love Turkish Food Turkish Airline Turkish Currency Turkish Air

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 the bed linen charge: Sayn yolcularmz: Ekspreslerimizde her gece iin alnacak ... Dear passengers: in our express trains every night there will be purchased ... yol yolcu yolcular road road-dealer, or really passenger passengers ekspres ekspresler ekspreslerimiz express train express trains our express trains

yolcularmz our passengers

ekspreslerimizde in our express trains

Variable Consonants (section 5.2, pg 26)

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 (, f, h, k, p, s, , t). The pairs are t/d, p/b, and /c. Also, a final k "softens" to when a vowel is suffixed kpek (dog) becomes kpei when it is the direct object. However, see the next section for some exceptions and irregularities.

Optional Letters
Some letters are optional, vowel or consonant buffers between the existing stem so far and the next suffix.

Ads by Google
Online Turkish Turkish Bread Turkish Music Turkish Visa Turkish Property

Other Morphological Issues

See the section on morphological changes at the end of the following section on nouns, pronouns, adjectives, etc. for details on other character shifts and some exceptions and irregularities.
Belly Dance Instrumentals Chalf Hassan, Emad... New $7.98 Best $4.89 Aziza's Ultimate Bellydance Pratice ... Aziza New $19.99 Best $16.06 Turkish Groove Putumayo Presents New $13.99 Best $6.98

1. 2. 3. 4. 5.
4 of 5

Background and introduction, with a list of real reference texts Word order, characters unique to Turkish, vowel harmony and variable vowels, HTM L rendering Next Pronouns, nouns, possession, adjectives, adverbs, conjunctions Verbs This is the big part! Word Order in Turkish Sentences
19/07/10 17:49

Basics of Turkish Grammar Word Order & Orthography

http://www.cromwell-intl.com/turkish/orthography.html

6. The Turkish Language Reform 7. An alphabetical list of all suffixes

Ads by Google

Turkish Chat

Turkish Villas

Turkish TV

Turkish Coffee

Turkish Airways

Home

Unix/Linux

Networking

Infosec

Travel

Technical

Radio

Site Map

Contact

Bob Cromwell Jul 2010. Created with /bin/vi and ImageMagick, hosted on OpenBSD with Apache.

Root password available here, privacy policy here.

5 of 5

19/07/10 17:49