You can mark you interesting snippets of text that will be available through a unique link in your browser.


Turkish language

Turkish language
Turkic language of Turkey, spoken by about 90% of its population.

Turkish has about 59 million speakers, with many enclaves in the Balkans and Cyprus (dating from Ottoman times) and in western Europe. Turkish was introduced into Anatolia with the invasion of Turkmen tribes in the 13th–14th centuries. Anatolian Turkish, written in the Arabic alphabet, is first attested in the 13th century. Ottoman Turkish was so heavily influenced by Persian and Arabic that it lost some of its Turkic characteristics and was incomprehensible to lower social strata. Efforts to re-Turkicize the language began in the 18th century but did not make serious gains until the 20th century and the founding of the Turkish republic. Much Perso-Arabic vocabulary was removed, and the Latin alphabet was adopted with the addition of diacritics to symbolize sounds peculiar to Turkish.

* * *

Turkish  Türkçe, or Türkiye Türkçesi,  

      the major member of the Turkic language family, which is a subfamily of the Altaic languages. Turkish is spoken in Turkey, Cyprus, and elsewhere in Europe and the Middle East. With Gagauz, Azeri (Azerbaijani), Turkmen, and Khorāsān Turkic, it forms the southwestern, or Oğuz, branch of the Turkic languages.

      Modern Turkish is the descendant of Ottoman Turkish and its predecessor, so-called Old Anatolian Turkish, which was introduced into Anatolia by the Seljuq Turks in the late 11th century AD. Old Turkish gradually absorbed a great many Arabic and Persian words and even grammatical forms and was written in Arabic script. After the founding of the Turkish republic in 1923, the Arabic script was replaced by the Latin alphabet (1928). The reform of the language was initiated and supported by the Turkish republican government. In spite of disputes and resistance, the movement contributed greatly to purifying the Turkish vocabulary of foreign elements. An essentially new literary language emerged, and the older one soon became obsolete.

      From the point of view of linguistic development, four periods of Turkish may be differentiated: Old (Anatolian and Ottoman) Turkish, 13th–16th century; Middle (Ottoman) Turkish, 17th–18th century; Newer (Ottoman) Turkish, 19th century; and Modern Turkish, 20th century.

      Turkish morphology is subject to sound harmony, of which palatal and labial vowel harmony is the most salient feature. Palatal harmony is based on a distinction between front vowels (e, i, ö, ü) and back vowels (a, ı, o, u). As a rule, all the vowels of a word belong to the same class (back or front)—e.g., sargı ‘bandage,' sergi ‘exhibition'—and the vowels of suffixes vary according to the class of vowels in the primary stem—e.g., ev-de ‘in the house,' but oda-da ‘in the room.' In morphology Turkish is marked by its tendency to expand the primary stem with different suffixes, of which many designate grammatical notions. Thus parasızlıklarından ‘because of their poverty' is composed of para ‘money,' -sız ‘-less,' -lık ‘-ness,' -lar = plural, ı(n) = possessive, -dan = ablative ‘from, due to.'

      Syntactically, Turkish, like other Turkic languages, tends to use constructions with verbal nouns, participles, and converbs in cases where English would use constructions with subordinative conjunctions or relative pronouns—e.g., geleceğini biliyorum ‘I know that (s)he will come' (literally ‘come-[future]-its-[accusative] know-[present]-I'), otelde kalan dostumuz ‘our friend who is staying in the hotel' (literally ‘hotel-in staying friend-our'), and gülerek girdi ‘(s)he entered laughing' (literally ‘laughing enter-[past]-(s)he').

* * *


Universalium. 2010.

  
Share  

Look at other dictionaries:

  • Turkish language — *cite book|last=Findley|first=Carter V.|title=The Turks in World History|publisher=Oxford University Press|year=2004|month=October|isbn=0 19 517726 6 *cite paper|author=Johanson, Lars|title=Discoveries on the Turkic linguistic… …   Wikipedia

  • Balkan Gagauz Turkish language — language name=Balkan Gagauz Turkish familycolor=Altaic states=Turkey, Greece, Republic of Macedonia speakers=331,000 fam1=Altaic [The existence of the Altaic family is controversial. See Altaic languages.] fam2=Turkic fam3=Oghuz iso3=bgxBalkan… …   Wikipedia

  • Ottoman Turkish language — Ottoman Turkish لسان عثمانى‎ lisân ı Osmânî Spoken in Ottoman Empire …   Wikipedia

  • Old Anatolian Turkish language — Not to be confused with Old Turkic language. Old Anatolian Turkish تُركجٔ Spoken in Sultanate of Rûm, Anatolian Beyliks Era Developed into the Early Ottoman Turkish …   Wikipedia

  • Turkish — 1. noun /ˈtə.kɪʃ,ˈtɝ.kɪʃ/ The official language of Turkey and Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus. 2. adjective /ˈtə.kɪʃ,ˈtɝ.kɪʃ/ Of, from, or pertaining to Turkey, the Turkish people or the Turkish language …   Wiktionary

  • Turkish Sign Language — language name=Turkish Sign Language nativename=Türk İşaret Dili familycolor=Sign family=Unknown states=Turkey, Northern Cyprus signers=Unknown iso2=sgn TR|iso3=tsmTurkish Sign Language ( tr. Türk İşaret Dili, TİD) is the language used by the deaf …   Wikipedia

  • Turkish nationalism — is a political ideology that promotes and glorifies the Turkish people, as either a national, ethnic or linguistic group. Like most forms of nationalism, it usually puts the interests of the state over all others influences, including religious… …   Wikipedia

  • Turkish Cypriots — Kıbrıslı Türkler 1st row: Fazıl Küçük · Kıbrıslı Mehmed Kamil Pasha · Kaytazzade Mehmet Nazım · Alparslan Türkeş  …   Wikipedia

  • Turkish Delight — Turkish Delight, lokum, or loukoum is a confection made from starch and sugar. It is often flavored with rosewater and lemon, the former giving it a characteristic pale pink color. It has a soft, jelly like and sometimes sticky consistency, and… …   Wikipedia

  • Turkish Croatia — was the name used between the 16th and 19th centuries for the northwest territory of Bosnia, today known as Bosanska Krajina (Bosnian Frontier). In the European literature of the 18th and 19th century, the name Turkish Croatia was used to refer… …   Wikipedia

Фильмы

  • Mikhail Frunze as a Revolutionary and a Military Leader., 1985 — On the occasion of the centenary of the birth of Mikhail Frunze, a distinguished revolutionary, legendary Civil War [Civil War in Russia in 1918-1922] hero, a military commander, strategist, who laid down the basis for the Red Army creation.