Turkish vacation This writing assignment caught me in the middle of my vacation. I'm spending it in Turkey. Hardly anyone of the local persons speaks English or Russian (my native language). Besides that I have a lot of spare time here - accordingly to these reasons I decided to learn the basics of Turkish language. It turned out to be a very engrossing activity; and in the post I'll try to tell you some fresh-learned colourful linguistic facts. More than one hundred years ago Turkey was a part of Ottoman Empire. The main language of the state was a mix from Arabic, Persian and an ancient version of Turkish languages.Besides, the Arabic writing was used. It didn't fit well to the Turkish, and this inconvenience led to the huge number of illiterate people. After the establishment of the modern Republic of Turkey, as one of reforms, the Ottoman script was replaced with Latin alphabet. Actually, due to the reforms the new version of language was created artificially. As consequence of that fact, the Turkish almost has no exceptions. It is phonetic also. It means that all words are sounded as like as they are written. The nouns don't have a gender, and the verbs don't change theirs endings due to the gender, like they do in Russian, for example. All these factors significantly simplify the learning. But there is a fly in the ointment. The Turkish is an agglutinative language. It means that there is a root words, and we should add different morphems (like stems and affixes) to the end to modify the sense. You can build a whole sentences in this way! It's a really exotic feature for the native European. For example, the word "evlerinizden", or "from your houses", consists of the morphems ev-ler-iniz-den, with the meanings house-plural-your-from. The popular here is the 44-letter word Çekoslovakyalılaştıramadıklarımızdanmışsınız, meaning "You are said to be one of those that we couldn't manage to convert to a Czechoslovak". Such a phrase is obviously meaningless, but it's pretty illustrative for language opportunities. So, that's the story of an ordinary vacation led to the bunch of fun language and historical experience. Be curious!