Turkish is one of the Turkic languages of the Altaic language family, one of the world's major language families. Turkic, Mongolian, and Manchu-Tungus constitute the Altaic language family, which originated around the Altai mountain ranges in central Asia, straddling Mongolia, China, and Russia. Altaic languages usually are grouped with the Uralic languages - for example, Samoyed, Finnish, and Hungarian. Debates continue about whether the typological and lexical similarities between the two language families signal a common ancestor language or prolonged contact.
The Turkish language shares a core vocabulary with the other Turkic languages and exhibits characteristic common features: vowel harmony, agglutination, and, on the syntactic level, left-branching. Turkish has eight vowels, four pairs with corresponding front/back, high/low, and rounded/unrounded sounds, which form the basis for vowel harmony. According to vowel harmony rules, vowels of suffixes must have the same properties as the vowel in the last syllable: either front/back or rounded/unrounded. Twenty-one letters represent the consonants. Agglutination in Turkish takes the form of suffixes attached to the end of a word, whether noun or verb. Suffixes add to the word's meaning and/or mark its grammatical function. Turkish does not have a definite article, nor does it have gender pronouns (one word signifies he, she, or it). Sentence construction follows the subject-object-verb pattern. As a left-branching language, all modifiers precede the element modified.
Rate it
(Mouse over the stars to rate this resource and click here to add your comment.)
About this contribution
| For learning |
Turkish |
| Base language |
 English |
| Tags |
|
| Views | 859 |