An Analytical Description of Turkish Introduction The following grammatical sketch is a description of the Turkish language. Turkish is a member of the Oghuz group of the Turkic family, being the most widely spoken of the Turkic languages, with around 80 million speakers. It is the national language of Turkey, also having minority groups of speakers in Bulgaria, Austria, Greece, Iraq, and a few other nations. My goal is to use my findings to create a comprehensive overview of Turkish and its phonology, morphology, and syntax. The speaker that I consulted to collect the following data grew up in the United States but spoke Turkish as their first language, being taught by a native-speaking parent. The speaker is bilingual, with native proficiency in English and Turkish. We held three total sessions, in which the speaker was asked to state and transcribe translations to various English sentences, with the purpose of collecting data on each of the desired categories listed above. Phonology Before beginning the discussion of Turkish phonetics, I must acknowledge that my research and description is limited only to natural Turkish words, as loanwords seem to introduce a number of complications to my conclusions. Having said that, Turkish syllables can range from one to four phonemes in length, but can only contain one vowel. I have identified a total of twenty-eight phonemes, broken into eight vowels and twenty consonants. My language consultant assisted me by writing down the Turkish alphabet and pronouncing each letter one at a time, while I associated the letters with their phonetic classes. There are strict rules that determine where certain phonemes can be used, based on the other phonemes found nearby. Vowels Turkish has front and back vowels, with both categories being broken into high and low. Furthermore, they are separated into unrounded and rounded vowels, making the Turkish vowel system three dimensional. For example, there could be a high, unrounded, front vowel. There are specific restraints placed on the available vowels, as there are no mid vowels or central vowels. The catalog of the IPA transcriptions of each vowel and how they are written in the Turkish alphabet, seen in parentheses, are in table one. Table 1: Turkish Vowel Classifications and IPA Counterparts Front Unrounded Front Rounded Back Unrounded Back Rounded High i (i) y (ü) ɯ (ı) u (u) Low e (e) œ (ö) a (a) o (o) Given these vowels, I wanted to decipher if there were any rules for why a word may contain front vowels or back vowels. I asked my consultant to translate a number of English sentences, and hand-picked some of the multi-syllable and multi-vowel words. When I inspected the words that had suffixes attached, it appeared that the suffixes were appearing in different forms. I have compiled some of these words in table two. Table 2: Examples of Vowel Harmony Front Vowels harmony Back Vowels harmony Telefonlar (telephones) Mutluyum (I am happy) öfkeli (furious) Kediler (cats) Sözsüz (without a word) Masada (on the desk) Sürücü (driver) Odaya (to the room) Based on this data, one can see that when a suffix is added to a word, the vowel of the suffix must match with the last vowel of the original word. The consonants in the word appear to have no effect on the vowels. This linguistic phenomenon is known as Vowel Harmony. One exception that should be noted is vowel harmony with verb conjugations and tenses. As you will see later in the morphological description, my data shows that vowel harmony does not seem to affect verb endings in the same way as in other suffixes. It appears that some verb ending suffixes are unchangeable, meaning they do not abide by the rules of vowel harmony, while others will change only their first vowel. However, all suffixes that are added to nouns, to the extent of my knowledge, will strictly follow the vowel harmony rule. Consonants Table 3: Turkish Consonants Represented in IPA Bilabial Stop Fricative Lab Dent Dental Post-alveolar Palatal Voiced b d (ɟ) g Voiceless p t (c) k Voiced v z ʒ Voiceless f s ʃ Nasal m Tap/Flap l Voiced ʤ Voiceless tʃ ɾ Glottal h n Approx. Affricate Velar j Not shown in the chart, there is a phoneme/letter ‘ğ’ whose pronunciation changes in specific contexts. It can (at least) be pronounced as a bilabial glide or it can be silent depending on the surrounding letters. However, I was unable to thoroughly study these contexts within the extent of my research, as my language consultant was unfamiliar with the specifics of the phoneme. With further research, I may be able to gather more information about it. There are two consonant allophones that I have identified, seen in parentheses above. The first of these is the voiceless velar stop ‘k’, which is pronounced as a voiceless palatal stop ‘c’ when next to a front vowel. Similarly, the voiced velar stop ‘g’ is replaced by ‘ɟ’, the voiced palatal stop, when adjacent to a front vowel. I also noted that when choosing between ‘d’ (voiced dental stop) and ‘t’ (voiceless dental stop) in a word, there seems to be an occurrence similar to Vowel Harmony. The voiced ‘d’ will be preferred if it follows another voiced consonant, while the voiceless ‘t’ follows voiceless consonants. An example of this can be seen in the words ‘evden’ (‘from the house’) and ‘safta’ (‘in line’) as translated by my consultant. In ‘evden’, the voiced labiodental fricative ‘v’ precedes the voiced dental stop ‘d’, while in ‘safta’ the voiceless dental stop ‘t’ comes after the voiceless labiodental fricative ‘f’. I am curious if this applies to other consonants as well. Word stress/accent Though I cannot include sound files to support my claims about where stress is placed in Turkish words, I believe that stress is on the last syllable of words, with only one stress per word. This was the case for the overwhelming majority of words that my consultant pronounced. Some of these words include: ‘erkek’ (‘man’), ‘kadın’ (‘woman’), and ‘evden’ (‘from the house’). There was a single case in which I discovered that the stress was placed on a non-final syllable, which was the word ‘epeski’ (‘very old’). However, as this was the only example of this non-final stress that I found, I am unsure if there is a specific rule for why this occurred. ‘Epeski’ is formed by adding the infix morpheme ‘pe’ in between syllables in the word stem ‘eski’ (‘old’). Therefore, a possible explanation is that stress must be placed on the infixed syllable, and placed on the last syllable in the absence of an infix. It is also possible that this pattern of stress is specific to the dialect of my speaker, and that stress is realized differently in different parts of Turkey. A clearly defined class of words that lives outside of this rule set are place names (names of cities, towns, provinces, etc.). As seen in ‘Istanbul’ and ‘Bursa’, two large cities in Turkey, the stress is placed on the first syllable. This is consistent for at least all Turkish place names, though I am unsure if foreign place names, such as ‘America’, follow the same rules. Turkish stress is heard as a rise in pitch on the accented syllable. When stress is non-final, the stressed syllable will be followed by a falling intonation. Lastly, in a question sentence, my language consultant used similar intonation to that of English, with rising intonation at the end of the sentence. Morphology The next step after understanding Turkish phonological units is understanding its units of meaning. Turkish words are formed by the process of agglutination, in which morphemes with distinct syntactic classifications are added to existing root words. To test this hypothesis, I gathered data by asking for the translation of an English root word, followed by various related words. This data will be used to make multiple claims about the language below. Derivational morphemes are those with distinct syntactic functions that create a new word when added to the end of a root word. They can often change the grammatical category of the word as well. However, the meaning of the new word is closely related to that of the root word. This process can also be seen in English. However, Turkish diverges from English agglutination in that it seems possible to add prepositions to the end of a noun; for this reason, they are called postpositions. Table three displays examples of derivational agglutination. The first three rows show agglutination that is very similar to English, while the last three demonstrate how a phrase of multiple English words can be expressed with one Turkish word. Table 4: Examples of Derivational Agglutination English word(s) Turkish translation Morpheme breakdown Part of speech lock kilit kilit noun To lock up kilitlemek kilit-lemek verb locked kilitlendi kilit-lendi adjective on the desk masada masa-da Postpositional phrase from the house evden ev-den Postpositional phrase To the room odaya oda-ya Postpositional phrase Another use for agglutination is to signify the subject of a sentence by adding on inflectional morphemes. Inflectional morphemes are those that modify a word without changing its meaning or changing the part of speech it belongs to. Instead, they simply add information to the word. An example is pronoun suffixes, which are added to verbs to signify the subject of the verb and added to the end of a noun to signify a state of being (like ‘I am a doctor’) or possession (‘my pillow’). I asked my language consultant for translations of English sentences containing four different words preceded by every possible subject. To ensure that only one variable of the word was changing, I kept the verbs in their present continuous tense forms. For each word I compiled data for every type of pronoun verb ending. Upon analyzing the translations, I concluded that Turkish subject suffixes do not change for male/female subjects, but distinctions are made between first person singular/plural, second person singular/plural, and third person singular/plural. The structure of the suffixes for each subject pronoun is similar, but the vowels will change depending on the Vowel Harmony of the word. Furthermore, the personal suffixes appear after the tense indicator suffix. Table 5: Personal Inflectional Suffixes Subject To live (verb subj.) ___ pillow (possessive) To be a chef To yell (verb subj.) 1st singular yaşıyorum yastığım şefim bağırıyorum 1st plural yaşıyoruz yastığımız şefimiz bağırıyorsun 2nd singular yaşıyorsun yastığın şefsin bağırıyor 2nd plural yaşıyorsunuz yastığınız şefsiniz bağırıyoriz 3rd singular (masculine) yaşıyor yastığı şef bağırıyor 3rd singular (feminine) yaşıyor yastığı şef bağırıyor 3rd plural (masc) yaşıyorları yastığıları şefleri bağırıyorları 3rd plural (fem) yaşıyorları yastığıları sefleri bağırıyorları I also examined the various tenses and how those are indicated in a Turkish verb. It appears that tenses are expressed by adding inflectional morphemes, too. The tenses that my speaker shared data for are present continuous (eg. eating), present simple (eg. eat), past (eg. ate), and future (eg. will eat). In order to eliminate confounding variables, I limited my example sentences to the first personal singular conjugation. This allowed me to more easily identify which morphemes were changing as the tense changed. Based on the data in table five, I have formed a rough idea for each tenses verb ending.The present continuous tense ending is ‘yor’, the present simple tense ending is ‘_r’, the past simple tense ending is ‘d’, and the future tense ending is ‘y_c_ğ’. The blanks are filled by vowels determined by vowel harmony. Furthermore, after each verb ending is the subject’s respective personal inflectional suffix. Table 5: Verb Tense Conjugations Tense ‘I live’ ‘I walk’ ‘to sleep’ ‘I jump’ Present cont. yaşiyorum yürüyorum uyuyorum zıplıyorum Present simple yaşirim yürürüm uyurum zıplarım Past simple yaşadım yürüdüm uyudum zıpladım Future yaşayacağım yürüyeceğim uyuyacağım zıplayacağım Lastly, there are two inflectional morphemes used to indicate plurality of a noun, ‘ler’ and ‘lar’. Which morpheme is used is dependent on the Vowel Harmony rule set described in the previous section. This means that in the case of the word containing back vowels, ‘lar’ will be used, and for front vowels, ‘ler’ will be used. While I will not be including a visual for this morpheme, as it seems to follow a simple rule without any special cases, it is a feature that is worth noting. Syntax After observing a variety of sentence translations from studying the morphology and phonology of Turkish, I had noticed clear differences between the word order in Turkish sentences compared to their English translations. In order to further investigate the specifics, I asked for four translations of English sentences with a variety of parts of speech, such as subject, object, and verb. These sentences in Turkish are seen below, as well as the English translation of each individual word and the reordered English translation of the whole sentence. (1) Tavşan Rabbit bir köpek gördü. a dog saw The rabbit saw a dog. (2) adam ayakkabıda yaşıyor The man the shoe in lives ‘The man lives in the shoe.’ (3) Biz lezzetli sandviçler We delicious sandwiches yapıyoruz. making ‘We are making delicious sandwiches’ (4) Tavşan ne Rabbit what gördü? see What did the rabbit see? In (1), ‘rabbit’ is the subject, ‘a dog’ is the object, and ‘saw’ is the verb; as seen in the unordered English translation ‘rabbit a dog saw’, the Turkish standard word ordering for these three classes is subject → object → verb. One side note from (1) is that the definite article ‘the’ is not represented in Turkish, while the indefinite article ‘a’ is represented by ‘bir’. ‘Bir’ is also used as the Turkish word for one. This word ‘bir’, as well as other quantifiers such as ‘another’, are known as particles in Turkish grammar. Sentence (2) contains the subject ‘the man’, the object ‘the shoe’, the English preposition ‘in’, and the verb ‘lives’. As discussed previously, Turkish has postpositions rather than prepositions, in which the positional morpheme is added to the end of the noun it is referring to. Therefore, it follows that the word order of (2) is subject → object+preposition → verb. Sentence (3) introduces an adjective, ‘delicious’, along with the subject pronoun ‘we’, the object ‘sandwiches’, and the verb ‘making’. (3) demonstrates that Turkish adjectives function very similarly to those of English. The ordering ‘lezzetli sandviçler’ shows that they appear in front of the object/noun they are describing, just like in the English translation ‘delicious sandwiches’. Demonstrations of earlier mentioned observations include the fact that the verb ‘are’ is assumed and not represented, and the personal inflectional suffix ‘uz’ is used to signify that the subject is first person plural. In fact, the free standing pronoun NP ‘biz’ could be omitted altogether—and often is—due to the existence of ‘uz’, giving Turkish the label of a null-subject language. Wh-movement Lastly, sentence (4) deals with a question and the possibility of wh-movement. The syntax tree for (4), first in Turkish and then English, can be seen below. The English question sentence clearly undergoes wh-movement, with the verb-object ‘what’ being moved to the beginning of the sentence and the tense node ‘did’ being moved directly ‘what’. However, as seen in the Turkish Tree, there is no wh-movement of the verb-object ‘ne’, and the sentence still follows the same word ordering (subject→object→verb) as a non-question sentence, eg. (1). This establishes Turkish as a non-wh-movement language. Expressing Emphasis With Word Order English has a feature where emphasizing a particular word in a sentence can cause a change in meaning. For example, ‘She didn’t take his money’ differs from ‘She didn’t take his money’. Turkish also has a method for emphasizing different parts of the sentence to change meaning, though it is done through the ordering of the words rather than their pronunciation. So far, we have seen standard Turkish word ordering, without any emphasis. Looking at a sentence with a subject, object, and verb, the ordering has been S-O-V. After being made aware of this method for emphasis by my language consultant, I subsequently asked them to express the sentence ‘Melody paints houses’ using different orderings. The results and the words that would be emphasized in English are below. Table 6: Effects of Word Ordering on Emphasis Ordering Turkish sentence Emphasized word SOV Melody evler boyar None OSV Evler Melody boyar Melody SVO Melody boyar evler Boyar (paints) VSO Boyar Melody evler Evler (houses) Conclusion In the course of my time spent with my language consultant, I have confirmed a number of hypotheses and identified various rules that dictate the Turkish language. Turkish word formation follows the rulesets of Vowel Harmony and apparent voiced/voiceless agreement for consecutive consonants on the phonemic level, while construction is done by adding derivational and inflectional morphemes to root words through agglutination. Stress comes on the last syllable of a word, except for in place names and exceptional cases. Turkish follows SOV word ordering, but lacks the phenomenon of wh-movement; however, word order can change to express emphasis on a word and change the interpretation of a sentence. Cause for Further Research Still, I have a number of questions that could likely be answered with more research and time spent focused on the subject. The first, as mentioned prior, is what causes word stress to fall on a non-final syllable in a word that isn’t a place name. There are also a number of parts of speech that I have yet to investigate in terms of word order, such as adverbs, particles, and conjunctions. The biggest question I have, however, is regarding the use of vowel harmony with verb tense suffixes like ‘yor’. This suffix seems to be immutable regardless of what vowels precede it in the word given. Further research could be done to identify what other verb endings this applies to, and if this occurs with other types of suffixes.