Turkish

I am not good with languages, unless you count chemistry as its own language.  I took four years of Japanese in high school, a year of french at the UW and a quarter of night school Spanish conversation.  It is probably growing up in California more than my hours of study, but my comprehension of these three languages would rank Spanish, French and then Japanese.  Of course there are far more cognates between English and the romance languages which helps a lot too. 

Turkey is in the Turkic language family and it is the most widely spoken of the Turkic languages.  Turkey was never really a colonizing power and so the only people who speak Turkish outside of Turkey reflect the fluctuating boarders of the country over the last 500 years and their closest trading parnters.  There are even parts of Turkey where most people don't speak Turkish, at least not as their first language, but we dont talk about the Armeians, to which, the correct responce is, 'what Armenians?'  Oddly enough, my study of Japanese all those years ago is quite helpful when learning Turkish.  Both languages put the verb at the end of the sentence.  The only thing that comes after the verb is the subject in the form of the verb's suffix.

For example: Amerika'dan geliyorum.  "America from come I" where the -um means I am the subject.

There are some new letters in the Turkish alphabet and some they dont use except for foreign words.
ı - pronounced like uh, I live in Yalı which means seaside house
ğ - silent g it makes other vowels longer like in Oğuz, my deparment head's last name, projounces ooz
ü,ö - I think the Germans have these also, I can't really say them, so I have no comment.
ş - pronounced sh like in Besiktaş a neighborhood near here I have written about before.
ç - pronounced ch like in çay or tea. 
c - While c is not a new letter, it is never pronounced sea  as in celing or or even kuh as in color, it is more like a j sound.  To spell my friend Jack's name, you would use Cak.

They don't use WQ or X except in borrowed words.  W gets mixed up with V, again like the Germans.  If X is needed they use ks, like in taksi, and I assume they do something similar for the Q.  Fortunately the language is very phonetic and evn though the words can be really long, they can all be sounded out.  This is thanks in large part to the conversion of the written language from a form of Arabic to using the Latin letters shared by Europe, done as part of the building of the republic in 1922.  Words could be spelled logically when all the spellings were made up at the same time.

Turkish is worse than German (I listened to an audio course in preparation for my trip to German in 2008) for making monster long words.  You can build entire sentences by modifiying the verb, the stem of which might be only three letters.    My example isn't nearly as long as it could be, but I only know the present tense so far.

Gitmiyorusunuz. "They are not going." where the -mi- negates the verb git-; -yor- makes it present tense and the sufix -usunuz is the subject, they

Many Turkish sentances don't even have verbs, and this is not Tarzan Turkish, but really fine, speak to your grandmother quality, Turkish. 

Toplam var mı? "Meeting exists?"
Toplam yok. "Absence of meeting."

Var and yok are two of my favorite Turkish words, they are very simple and very useful. 
Quiz var mı? "Is there a quiz?"  - when mı is at the end of a sentence it makes it a question.
Var. "There is." or Yok. "There isn't." 
Neither var nor yok are verbs, I learned to my signifigant confusion and surprise.  They act like verbs in sentences but you dont have to conjugate them which is nice. 

One of the most confusing aspects of Turkish that I have encountered so far, is vowel harmony.  The suffixes and prepositions for 'to,' 'from,' 'with,' etc change depending on the last vowel of the word they modify. 
Sütlü - with milk as in milk chocolate
Yaşlı - with years as in old
In both cases it is the -l_ suffix which means with, but the vowel has to match (not exactly, just the position in your mouth that you make it with), harmonize with the noun it modifies. 

This also happens when you make compound nouns like book store (kitpevi) or chemistry classroom (kimya dersi).  To show that two nouns go together you change the ending of the second one, not unlike putting sodium and chlorine together to get sodium chloride. (See chemistry is its own language.)    Understanding this has made decoding signs easier.  I can recognize the noun and disregard the ending since it just links two nouns together.  Unfortunately it isn't always a one to one correspondance between vowel used and vowel added.  In many cases, several of the Turkish vowels (and there are 8) map to the same harmony vowel, which should make it easier, but then you have to remember which maps to which.  My guess is, anyone who grows up speaking Turkish has no problem with this.  They may not be able to explain it, but they probably never get it wrong. 

There are some English words that we don't use here because of their similarities to bad words in Turkish.  I am not sure what they all mean, but students are never 'sick' they are always 'ill' and if you are not sure what to say next, you don't say 'um' but either 'şay' or 'ah'.  Of course this goes both ways.  I have already written about my student named Behiç, where the ç is pronounced ch and our food is prepared in the mutfak next to the cafeteria. 

There are lots of little phrases in Turkish that dont have direct translations but are very friendly. At lunch you would say 'afiyet olsun' which means roughly enjoy your meal. If someone is working you say 'kolay gelsin' which means may it come easy. If someone has made dinner for you, you say something that translates as 'health to your hands'. All of these little phrases are very sweet and friendly. 

I have been taking the Turkish lesson provided by the school for an hour and a half each Wednesday afternoon.  There are three of us in the class, the other two are ahead of me, having been here for longer.  This is good, because it pulls me along at a slighly greater clip.  They are also English teachers, which means they can help make connections to the parts of speech I am familiar with, although sometimes it gets pretty technical.  We have homework most weeks, which I do right before the next class to get warmed up for the lesson.  I do find that I understand more when I am in the grocery store or in a taxi.  I am still not very productive, as in I dont speak unless absolutely necessary, but I can if I need to.  Just this week I actually asked for half a kilo of stew meat at the grocery store, out loud even, and I was understood!  In class I have written a paragraph about what I do in a day and I have understood my clasmates paragraphs, which I think is pretty good. 

There are a surprising number of cognates or borrowed words, many from French and English, some also from Spanish (and lots from Arabic and Persian, but since I dont know anythign about those languages I dont see the connections.)  It was hard to see them at first, espeically since they are often spelled very differently.  See if you can figure these out:
radyo
banyo
taksi
yat
kafeterya
biyoloji
gazete
kedi (probably not really a cognate, but so close)

I still think I understand more Spanish than Turkish, but it is getting better.

Finally, here are two more of my favorite Turkish words:
kalabalik = crowded
denizanasi = jellyfish