Sun Language Theory, Part 3: Istanbul Interlude (Turkish)
This is Part 3 of a series on the Turkic languages that I’ve studied (i.e., most of the major ones). Part 1 (Uyghur and Uzbek) is here. Part 2 (Tatar, Bashkir, Kazakh, Kyrgyz) is here.
Once again, I’ve gone months without updating this blog — but this time I have a good reason! I was, let’s say, doing field research for this post, which is about the most spoken and by far the most well-known Turkic language of them all — Turkish.
As I mentioned I would be doing last time, I took a short trip to Istanbul in June, bookending a trip to Bratislava, Slovakia for this year’s edition of the Polyglot Gathering.
I flew to Istanbul, spent two days doing the main tourist things, went to Bratislava for the Gathering, and then went back to Istanbul for five more days, which happened to partially overlap with the three-day Eid al-Fitr holiday (or “Bayram” in Turkish) which marked the end of Ramadan.
Since Turkish is the only language in this series that I’ve had on-the-ground experience speaking, here’s a quick summary of what that was like, before I get into the more linguistic stuff.
“Derdini anlatmak”
Turkish has an interesting way of describing a basic, “conversational” level of language ability: derdini anlatmak, which literally means “to explain one’s pain.” It basically means you’re able to get your point across when necessary, if not in the most eloquent, idiomatic way.
At the end of this trip, if not at the beginning, I think I managed to get to the level of derdini anlatmak in Turkish.
I’d been brushing up on Turkish for several months before this trip, so I came prepared, at least in the reading department. But speaking and listening was a bit more difficult, so I tried to speak Turkish as much as possible while I was in Istanbul.
First off, when ordering food or buying things on the street, I tried to only speak in Turkish and mostly was able to do so. In other situations, especially in touristy areas when someone else initiated a conversation in English, I would try to switch the conversation into Turkish at some point early on, which tended to work well enough. One common scenario was that someone would ask me where I was from in English, and then I’d respond in Turkish (since the answer is a bit complicated).
On two separate occasions, I also had locals start conversations with me in Japanese, and I would play along for a bit, and explain that I wasn’t Japanese, in Japanese, before switching to Turkish and saying I speak some Turkish too.
I also checked out several Couchsurfing meetups in Istanbul (they have three events a week) which were attended by an interesting mix of locals and visitors from Europe, the Middle East and the former Soviet Union. These events were probably where I got to have the most involved Turkish conversations, and also conversations in Russian, Arabic, Persian, Spanish, German, and so on.
If you’re interested in more details of my trip, you can check out my Instagram (I use it very little when I’m not traveling, so if you’re reading this in the next few months, my Istanbul photos should still be near the top of the feed).
How Turkish Compares With Other Turkic Languages
It’s become a cliche to point this out at this point, but well, Istanbul is a city that spans two continents, and Turkey as a whole has an interesting mix of “Eastern” and “Western” influence.
The Turkish language in particular has come a long way from the proto-Turkic homeland in western Mongolia, and every once in a while in Istanbul I was struck by how wild it was that the language being spoken on the streets here was closely* related to languages spoken by very different people in the mountains of Kyrgyzstan, or the oases of Xinjiang.
(*Of course, the fact that say, Bengali and Irish are related is mind-blowing in its own way, but the opposite ends of Indo-European are also not nearly as closely related as the Turkic languages are to each other.)
Turkish, Azerbaijani, Turkmen and some smaller languages such as Gagauz, Qashqai and Salar are classified as “Oghuz” or Southwestern Turkic languages. I can read a good amount of Azerbaijani — and it’s occasionally even easier for me than Turkish because it uses more Arabic/Persian/Russian words — but I don’t know much about the other languages in this group. Because of that, I’m not always sure how much of the peculiarities of Turkish come from the Oghuz group in general, and how much is specific to Turkish. Anyway, these are some of the more notable differences between Turkish and the other Turkic languages I’ve written about previously (from the Karluk and Kipchak groups):
- Initial “t” and “k” often get voiced to “d” and “g”, e.g. Turkish dağ vs. Uyghur tagh “mountain”, Turkish gün vs. Uyghur kün “day”
- The “q” sound and “ng” sounds are completely merged with “k” and “n”
- The “gh” sound, although still shown in writing, is usually not pronounced anymore (dağ is really more like daa, for example).
- The beginnings of many case suffixes are dropped after consonants, e.g. Turkish -i vs. Uyghur -ni (direct object), Turkish -a vs. Uyghur -qa/-gha (indirect object), Turkish -in vs. Uyghur -ning (possessive)
- The “-KAN” (-qan/-gen/-ghan/-ken) suffix for past perfect is gone, and replaced by “-miş/-muş” which has also taken on an evidential meaning.
In other ways, though, Turkish has also stayed more “normal” and closer to old Turkic. For example, unlike Kyrgyz and Kazakh, Turkish doesn’t do “consonant harmony.” Unlike Kyrgyz and Siberian Turkic languages, Turkish doesn’t have extreme rounding harmony. And unlike Uyghur, Turkish doesn’t have vowel reduction (okay, maybe it does a little, but not as widespread as it is in Uyghur).
Finally, one of the biggest peculiarities of modern Turkish is the effect of Ataturk’s language reforms, which got rid of a lot (but far from all) of the more elaborate Arabic/Persian loans and created a bunch of new, invented words from supposed native Turkic roots. This was one of the trickiest parts for me when I was trying to learn Turkish vocabulary, because I couldn’t rely on my Arabic and Persian knowledge quite as much as when I was learning Uzbek or Uyghur.
What’s Next?
Now that I’m back from the Polyglot Gathering and Turkey, my next big* trip on the horizon is the Polyglot Conference in Fukuoka this October, where I’m pleased to announce I will be doing a workshop on the Uyghur language!
(*Before that, I’m also planning to head up to Montreal once again for this year’s LangFest in August, as always.)
This means that I will be focusing on Uyghur once again for the next few months and de-prioritizing Turkish . I’m also planning to pick up some Korean and Nepali before the conference, and making some other adjustments to the pan-Asian language learning plan I laid out last year.
In terms of this blog, this means there are at least two more articles to look forward to in the near future: one final post in this Turkic language series to wrap things up, and then another post about my current language study plan, which will include some thoughts about studying “similar” languages (e.g. Korean/Japanese or Arabic/Hebrew) at the same time, among other things. Stay tuned!
