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Turkish family of languages | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages |  | |
| sigiloso Heptaglot Groupie Portugal Joined 6780 days ago 87 posts - 103 votes  Speaks: Spanish*, EnglishC2, PortugueseC1, Galician, French, Esperanto, Italian Studies: Russian, Greek | Message 1 of 88 08 May 2006 at 6:55am | IP Logged |
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Hi all,
Could anyone here clarify the whole matter of the Turkish languages, especially number of speakers and degree of intelligibility with Turkish? It would suffice just the major ones, I know there are many minority and endangered languages in the family. Just to have a clear big picture; might be very useful for forumers considering to put Turkish in their shopping basket. I am having difficulty settling this on the net. Thanks a lot Cheers, Edited by sigiloso on 08 May 2006 at 7:18am 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| andee Tetraglot Senior Member Japan Joined 7078 days ago 681 posts - 724 votes 3 sounds Speaks: English*, German, Korean, French | Message 2 of 88 08 May 2006 at 7:01am | IP Logged |
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You might want to start here.
It gives you a run down the Turkic family and might help with some points. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| sigiloso Heptaglot Groupie Portugal Joined 6780 days ago 87 posts - 103 votes Speaks: Spanish*, EnglishC2, PortugueseC1, Galician, French, Esperanto, Italian Studies: Russian, Greek | Message 3 of 88 08 May 2006 at 7:24am | IP Logged |
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Thank u andee
I had read the wiki article, naturally, but the question of mutual intelligibility remains unclear. Maybe we need a Turkish language-lover who has travelled to Middle Asia to get the straight dope... 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| andee Tetraglot Senior Member Japan Joined 7078 days ago 681 posts - 724 votes 3 sounds Speaks: English*, German, Korean, French | Message 4 of 88 08 May 2006 at 7:32am | IP Logged |
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Absolutely - I'm quite interested in the crossover as well. Turkish is on my long term wishlist and some details about transparency with the lesser known languages would suit me just fine.
Maybe !LH@N could give us some info :) 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| daristani Senior Member United States Joined 7145 days ago 752 posts - 1661 votes Studies: Uzbek | Message 5 of 88 08 May 2006 at 11:52am | IP Logged |
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As a non-native but quite fluent speaker of Turkish with some experience in Uzbekistan, I can say that while there are great similarities among the various Turkic languages, and knowledge of any one makes learning the others easier, they are indeed different languages (and not "dialects" as some overly nationalist types in Turkey maintain). There is a varying degree of mutual intelligibility, ranging from quite high between Turkish and Azerbaijani to very minimal between Turkish and Uzbek or Kazakh. (Kazakh and Kirghiz are fairly close to one another, however, as are Uzbek and Uyghur.)
In a sense, however, mutual intelligibility between Turkish and the other Turkic languages has declined in recent decades as the Turks of Turkey have thrown out a great many Arabic and Persian words to replace them with supposedly (and in some cases questionably) Turkish words. This has caused the lexical differences to grow, although there has also been a slight tendency for some other Turkic languages, particularly Azerbaijani, to adopt some of this "new" vocabulary from Turkish. (The excellent book by Geoffrey Lewis, "The Turkish Language Reform: A Catastrophic Success" deals very thoroughly and entertainingly with the problems of the vocabulary changes in Turkey itself, but doesn't focus much on the question of interintelligibility with the other Turkic languages.) In a practical sense, if you speak good Turkish, you can communicate without great difficulties, at least at a fairly basic level, in Azerbaijan, and to a substantially lesser extent in Turkmenistan, but will have difficulty reading books, understanding the television, etc. Further afield in Central Asia, your Turkish won't do you much good beyond making it easier for you to learn the other Turkic languages. (The core vocabulary, as well as the basic "logic" of these languages, are very similar, but the phonology and actual grammar, particular in terms of verbal morphology, are quite different, on top of the vocabulary differences cited.) A native speaker of any Turkic language certainly has a big advantage over a "foreigner" in learning any of the others, but materials in any one Turkic language for learning the others is almost non-existent. In this sense, there is a variety of materials available in English, but you have to do some searching to obtain them, as most are not available via Amazon and the like. In terms of approaching the family as a whole, I'd recommend learning Turkish first as being the most accessible, as it has by far the most speakers, as well as the best learning materials and chances for interaction (not just in Turkey, but also with the many Turks in Europe and elsewhere.) Materials for the other Turkic languages are much harder to come by, although there are more grammars and dictionaries coming available as time passes. 10 persons have voted this message useful | |
| sigiloso Heptaglot Groupie Portugal Joined 6780 days ago 87 posts - 103 votes Speaks: Spanish*, EnglishC2, PortugueseC1, Galician, French, Esperanto, Italian Studies: Russian, Greek | Message 6 of 88 08 May 2006 at 12:47pm | IP Logged |
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Daristani: thank you so much for this informative answer. I suggest the administrator to include the essence of this information in the Turkish language profile when you find the time.
1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Eriol Diglot Senior Member Sweden Joined 6867 days ago 118 posts - 130 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English Studies: Portuguese | Message 7 of 88 08 May 2006 at 2:20pm | IP Logged |
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I was thinking about asking exactly the same question a couple of days ago. It is indeed hard to find reliable information about how similar these languages really are. Big thanks to Sigilosi for asking the question and Daristani for answering it.
A fascinating but also complicating issue with the Turkic languages is the writing system. Arabic, Latin and Cyrillic script with lots of variations have been used for different languages at different points in time. Sometimes the language is spoken exactly the same on the other side of the borde but written differently. It must be really hard to form some kind of literary tradition when the alphabet can be changes on a whim by some distant ruler. Information about the Azeri situation which is by no means unique (even if it's quite extreme) can be found here: http://www.azeri.org/Azeri/az_english/aboutaz_index.html 2 persons have voted this message useful | |
| andee Tetraglot Senior Member Japan Joined 7078 days ago 681 posts - 724 votes 3 sounds Speaks: English*, German, Korean, French | Message 8 of 88 09 May 2006 at 6:21am | IP Logged |
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Yes, many thanks daristani :)
1 person has voted this message useful |
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