LiCTLe of the Month for December: Turkish

Life is too short to be vanilla.  Too short to only order off the first page of the menu.  It's also too short to only care about French, German and Spanish.  Okay, maybe you spent some time experimenting in college and took a semester or two of Chinese or Arabic.  Don't get me wrong, these are all fine languages, but sometimes you just need something different.

I can't claim to have originated the term LiCTLe (for Less Commonly Taught Language). It was passed to me through the smoke of an Istanbul tavern by a linguist friend of mine from UC Santa Cruz.  Over pints of Efes Pilsen, we discussed the special difficulties known to students of these less popular languages: unreliable dictionaries, textbooks from the '50's (if not the 1850's) and skeptical stares from people who think you're just making these words up.

Let us take a few moments to celebrate the obscure, beautiful and exotic languages from the hinterland of linguistic research.  And let's begin this first installment of the LiCTLe of the Month Club with a language near and dear to my heart... Turkish.

Turkish is spoken by about 70 million people worldwide and is the official language of the Republic of Turkey.  Turkish underwent considerable language planning efforts in the first half of the 20th century.  During this period, an alphabet based of Latin letters replaced the use of the Arabic script.  There are also pockets of Turkish speakers in many of the countries that were formerly part of the Ottoman Empire, such as Bulgaria, Romania and Iraq. 

During post-WWII reconstruction, many Turks went to Europe as guest workers, mostly from the rural, southern part of Turkey.  Policies which allowed guest workers to bring their wives and children to live with them, as well as a military coup in Turkey in 1980, convinced many to stay in Europe.  In 2003, a study done at the University of Essen in Germany reported that there were 3.86 million Turks in the EU, including those who were citizens of their home country.  The bulk of this Turkish population is in Germany and The Netherlands, some of whom are now the children and grandchildren of immigrants.

The grammatical feature I would like to illustrate is the Turkish agglutinative word-formation strategy.  Now, "agglutination" is just a fancy word for "glue-ing" prefixes or suffixes onto a root word.  English has some agglutinative tendencies, as in this famous word:

anti-dis-establish-ment-arian-ism

In which the root word, "establish," is turned into new words by adding mini-words (like "anti-" or "-ism") before and after it.  While English agglutination goes both ways, Turkish almost always uses suffixes:

kedi kedi-ler kedi-ler-iniz kedi-ler-iniz-e	at at-lar at-lar-ınız at-lar-ınız-a
cat cats your cats to your cats	horse horses your horses to your horses

There's another interesting property of Turkish on display here.  In the suffixes following "kedi" the vowels are always either an "E" or and "I", while those following "at" are always an "A" or a dot less-"I." This is called vowel harmony and it insures that every suffix is pronounced with a similar vowel to the last vowel of the root word.

Notice also that in the last two examples, "to your cats" and "to your horses," one Turkish word is the equivalent of a three-word English phrase.  That is, Turkish can add a suffix where English has to add extra words.  Turkish can also add suffixes when English speakers have to choose a whole different word.  To illustrate, let's look a basic verb:

tanı-mak
to know (someone)

It is important to note that "tanımak" means know in the sense of being acquainted with (as in: "Oh yeah, I know Tom!") not in the sense of knowing a fact or a skill.  The root word is "tanı-" and "-mak" serves as the infinitive marker (similar to the "to" in "to know").  Let's add another suffix:

tanı-ş-mak
to meet, to get to know (someone)

The "-Ş-" that we've added is called a reciprocal, and it changes the meaning of the root word.  It tells us that the action is happening mutually between people, in other words, two or more people are getting to know each other.  The reciprocal is somewhat limited in the number verbal root words it can combine with- for example,  "sevmek," to love, but "sevişmek" to make love.

tanı-ş-tır-mak
to introduce, to cause (someone) to know (someone)

The so-called causative suffix (here "-TIR-"), adds another actor onto the stage.  Now the subject of the verb is the person who is causing the action to happen.  So far, we've gone through the semantic ground covered by the English verbs "to know," "to meet," and "to introduce" without getting off the Turkish "tanı-" train!  Finally, let's slap a caboose on this verb and take her to the station:

tanı-ş-tır-ıl-mak
to be introduced, to be made known by someone to someone (else)

Here, we add a passive suffix, "-IL," which removes an actor from the script and promotes the direct object to the staring role.  In other words, the introducer is gone and the introducee has become the subject.  The core meaning, however, is still based on the root word.

I hope you've enjoyed this inaugural edition of the LiCTLe of the Month Club.  If you would like to see more of this sort of thing here at schendo.com, why not leave me a nice comment?  If you didn't enjoy it, then why are you still reading?  I mean, my attention span craps out at like 800-900 words max.... Oh, Squirrel!

Next LiCTLE of the Month: Swedish

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This essay could not have been written without Aslı Göksel and Celia Kerslake's excellent Comprehensive Grammar of Turkish.  I also made use of the Redhouse English-Turkish/Turkish-English Dictionary.  I also want to give a big shout-out to all my arkadaşlarım at Boğaziçi Üniversitesi, whose intensive summer Turkish Language and Culture Program I highly, highly recommend.