April 19th - back to school

[Gordonb]

After a 3 week break we are back to our Turkish classes, now we are Beginners (2). Between us Rey and I have Spanish, English and French at varying levels of fluency and we can get by in shops, cafes and the like in Italian and German. Now we're settled in Turkey and in the new year we started our Beginners Turkish;

Turkish is agglutinative, that is, grammatical functions are indicated by adding various suffixes to stems. Separate suffixes on nouns indicate both gender and number, but there is no grammatical gender. Nouns are declined in three declensions with six case endings: nominative, genitive, dative, accusative, locative, and ablative; number is marked by a plural suffix. Verbs agree with their subjects in case and number, and, as in nouns, separate identifiable suffixes perform these functions. The order of elements in a verb form is: verb stem + tense aspect marker + subject affix. There is no definite article; the number "one" may be used as an indefinite article. Subject-Object-Verb word order in Turkish is a typical Turkic characteristic, but other orders are possible under certain discourse situations. As a SOV language where objects precede the verb, Turkish has postpositions rather than prepositions, and relative clauses that precede the verb. Turkish has 8 vowels, and 21 consonants. It also has Turkic vowel harmony in which the vowels of suffixes must harmonize with the vowels of noun and verb stems; thus, for example, if the stem has a round vowel then the vowel of the suffix must be round, and so on. Stress on words pronounced in isolation is on the final syllable, but in discourse, stress assignment is complicated especially in the verb.

See, easy peasy!
The encouraging thing is that the language is very logical and regular- there are hardly any irregularities. So once the basics are mastered,  theoretically it will become relatively easy to develop an understanding of the language. Unfortunately my rapidly ageing and dying brain cells are having a great problem remembering even simple things like numbers and days of the week. So sadly I still find myself in the bakers pointing and holding up fingers instead of saying "iki tane ekmek Lütfen.
Our teacher tells us that we will get there ... I understand that Finnish is another agglutinative language too.

[Chris L]

Oh, Jesus, Gordon, just reading your description of Turkish makes me feel like I'm trying to learn quantum mechanics (which I've done to the extent that I wrote a couple of YA books on it, then swore off). However, I still expect you to be speaking it fluently the next time I see you, which you will prove by ordering a meal in a Turkish restaurant without the waiter ever once wincing or asking you to repeat something. 

[Gordonb]

Chris, so long as you want kebab and kofte   (T = kebap and köfte)we shouldn't have any problems.