Edit

Vowel Harmony

Turkish is an agglutination language. Which means that words are modified by adding suffixes to them, instead of adding more words around them, as english does. In order to make the resulting words pronounceable suffixes 'morph'. For example: While the first-person possesive suffix is in a dictionary as "-im", it is often found written and pronounced as "-ım". This morphing of suffixes is called "Vowel Harmony", and luckily for language learners, follows a very simple pattern.

However, before you can get vowel harmony. You must know that in turkish vowels are broken into 2 groups; "front" vowels, and "back" vowels. The front vowels are "e, i, ö, ü", and the back vowels are "a, ı, o, u". When you add a suffix to a word, you convert all vowels in that suffix to the type of the last vowel in the word. "e" goes to "a", "i" goes to "ı", "ö" goes to "o", and "ü" goes to "u".

Example

otel means hotel.
-a means to (as in "I throw the ball to mary")


but the last vowel of otel "e" is not in the same class as the "a" in -a. So we convert the a to it's corresponding front vowel. Which happens to be "e".


We then get "otele", which means "to the hotel"