Turkish!

Hey everyone!
Marcus' comment reminded me that I'd been meaning to write a post about the Turkish language, so I figured I'd do that now. It's been pretty fun, learning Turkish, although I'm tripped up a lot by pronounciation of the vowels, especially ö, ü, and the "i" without the dot (I haven't figured out how to type that one yet). My other languages have come in handy: Turkish has a "ma" particle, like Chinese, used to ask a yes-no question. Of course, where it's just "ma" in Chinese, it's "mi," "mi(no dot)," "mu," and "mü," because Turkish has vowel harmony, which means that you match up the vowel of the particle with the last particle of the word before it. It's pretty easy to just gloss over in conversation, because I seem to subconsiously harmonize the vowels, but when I'm writing, I always have to stop and think about which vowels are linked.

Turkish is also a case language, which means that the subject and object of the verb in a sentence are indicated, so that word order doesn't matter as much (English isn't a case language, but Latin is). There is a "preferred" word order (basically subject-object-verb, at least from what I've learnt so far), but it's ok if you don't say it correctly, which is great for me.

Turkish is also an agglutinative language, as Marcus pointed out (English isn't an agglutinative language, but Finnish is). This makes stringing sentences together...interesting, for me. It also makes for some really, really long words. I've only learned present-tense conjugations so far, but they seem designed to make every verb at least 8 or so letters long. For example, "bilmek," or "to know," is conjugated in the first-person-singular present tense as "biliyorum" (I know). Negating is pretty simple; you just add an "m" in the middle, for example to make "bilmiyorum," or "I don't know." I've been using the phrase "bilmiyorum Türkçe" a whole heck of a lot recently. So far, the agglutination hasn't been too much of a big deal for me, because I don't know enough structure to string together megawords, but my Turkish teacher did give us a longer Turkish word during a discussion we had about word lengths; it sort of makes me a bit nervous about what I'll learn next, grammar-wise: it's çekoslavakyalilastiramadiklarimizdanmisiniz. You'll have to imagine most of the "i"s without dots, and the middle "s" with a line through it, because I can't type those letters on this keyboard. The word is a full question, and doesn't really make a lot of sense, but it literally means "Are you one of the people who we couldn't make Czechoslovakian?"

One of the easier things about Turkish is the structure of related words. If you want to say that someone does something, you append "-cu" or one of its vowel-harmony variants to the noun. For example, "futbol" is soccer, so "futbolcu" is soccer player. Possession is similarly easy, you just append "-im" (for "my") or a variant to the word, for example "defter" is notebook, so "defterim" is my notebook.

I'm really enjoying learning Turkish so far. It's not anything like English, so I can't use English as a crutch as you can with Romance languages; even the cognates don't always sound like they're from the same word ("bilardo" is billiards, but I'd never have guessed it). Turkish is a very logical language, with almost no irregular verbs so far, which is nice.

In other news here in Turkey, it's been snowing here all weekend, but not half as much as I hear it's snowed in Boston. The difference is that they still don't plow here, so I had to wade through a foot of wet slush to return a book to the library today. I spent the rest of the day comfortably ensconced in my dorm, reading, surfing the web, talking with other exchange students, and making dinner with some other American students (it was pasta with a fesh-tomato-based sauce; I've made this 4 times with exchange students, and am fully convinced that this must be the one dish that every college kid worth their salt can make and likes to make). Next weekend, I believe I'll be in Cappadocia, although I haven't signed up for the trip yet; it should be fun, and it'll be nice to get out of Ankara. On Thursday and Friday, I don't have classes, so I think I'm going to try and find the pazaar in Maltepe (a region of Ankara), which is supposed to be the biggest pazaar in Ankara; it'll be an adventure, as I'll get to take the Metro system (subway) to get there.

Well, that's about it for now, so I'll just leave you all with one of the longest words in Turkish: Muvaffakiyetsizlestiricilestiriveremeyebileceklerimizdenmissinizcesine. It means "acting like you're one of those people who support bad manners," and I have no clue when you'd actually want to use it. But it's fun, nonetheless. Hope I wasn't too confusing with the Turkish grammar rambling,
'Til later,
-R