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Yürükler - Call to the (fool)hardy ones

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Expugnator
Hexaglot
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Brazil
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 Message 57 of 65
15 April 2015 at 11:49pm | IP Logged 
Chung, I'm about to start dabbling in Turkmen but I've read your report on your log about the bad quality of the audio from the Peace Corps course; Now, is there an alternative? I can't play Flash videos here, so I don't have access to Headstart's audio. "Basic Turkmen" has no audio afaik.
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Chung
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 Message 58 of 65
16 April 2015 at 3:32am | IP Logged 
You could try using CultureTalk Turkmenistan since most of the videos are in Turkmen. However they're probably not ideal for a total beginner as I suspect you know already after having used CultureTalk Georgia.

That's a bit of a problem that you can't use Flash player as the DLIFLC's material needs it (e.g. DLIFLC Familiarization and Language Survival Kits), and they're great for getting attuned to the language's sound and matching sound with text. Is it only on your work computer that you can't use Flash or is it that you've had too many problems with Flash on any computer?
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Expugnator
Hexaglot
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Brazil
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 Message 59 of 65
16 April 2015 at 7:15pm | IP Logged 
Only here. It's the audioblock. I don't have time before or afterwards, though. Maybe I work on a textbook without audio and dabble in Headstart once in a while when I have time at home.
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Expugnator
Hexaglot
Senior Member
Brazil
Joined 4926 days ago

3335 posts - 4349 votes 
Speaks: Portuguese*, Norwegian, French, English, Italian, Papiamento
Studies: Mandarin, Georgian, Russian

 
 Message 60 of 65
16 April 2015 at 11:05pm | IP Logged 
I downloaded the course so maybe I can try to use the course online and just play the sound files from my computer. It will be a bit messy but enough to get an idea of how the language sounds.
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Chung
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 Message 61 of 65
02 July 2015 at 1:17am | IP Logged 
Update for Turkish, Turkmen and Uzbek
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daristani
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Studies: Uzbek

 
 Message 62 of 65
21 August 2015 at 11:19pm | IP Logged 
As possible encouragement for those interested in the Turkic family of languages, here's a recent article from someone who studied Uzbek:

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/16/magazine/letter-of-recomme ndation-uzbek.html?_r=0

(I'd dispute the writer's characterization of the grammar as "simple", but her stress of its regularity is indeed accurate. Mastering all the intricacies of the verbal system, however, is a real challenge.)
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vonPeterhof
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 Message 63 of 65
24 August 2015 at 5:37pm | IP Logged 
Interesting article, daristani, thanks for sharing it. I wish the author had mentioned something about the orthography though. It may not be as irregular and arcane as that of English, but it does have surprisingly non-transparent features. For one there seems to be no real rule for when "a" should be pronounced [a] and when [æ] and you just have to learn which sound is used in which words and morphemes. Also, the Russian loanwords tend to follow Russian orthogaphic conventions while retaining some of the original pronunciation, making for some hard to predict patterns for someone not familiar with Russian (e.g. the irregular stresses, the "o" being more like the Uzbek "oʻ" and the unstressed "a" being more like the Uzbek "o", etc.). Obviously the latter isn't a problem for me as a native speaker of Russian, while my familiarity with Kazakh helps somewhat with the former, since [æ] very often corresponds to "e" in Kazakh cognates. However, I would like to know whether or not any learners without my advantages were bothered by this. And that's not even getting into Uzbek's de facto biscriptal status within the same country and the relative inadequacy of computer support for both of those scripts.

Edited by vonPeterhof on 25 August 2015 at 2:13am

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daristani
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Studies: Uzbek

 
 Message 64 of 65
25 August 2015 at 1:02am | IP Logged 
vonPeterhof, I've also had your experience with the seeming inconsistency of the sounds of Uzbek, particularly (at least for me) in terms of the vowels.   

I speculate that this may derive in part from the fact that the language is actually sort of a composite of dialect groups deriving from three different sub-groups (Oghuz, Qipchaq, and Qarluq/Chaghatay) of the Turkic family, and in addition that while the written language primarily represents the Iranized dialect of Tashkent, in which vowel harmony is lacking, the other dialects still retain vestiges of the vowel harmony common to Turkic, as well as other differences in both phonology and morphology.

I spent about three months in Tashkent about 20 years ago, and had only very limited knowledge of Uzbek, largely derived from self-study of the very scarce materials in English that were available at the time. (I didn't know a word of Russian, but spoke pretty fluent Turkish.) On a few occasions, Uzbeks told me my Uzbek sounded like the Khorezmian (Oghuz) dialect spoken near Turkmenistan. This was probably because of my tendency to pronounce things as in Turkish, and to fall into at least a degree of vowel harmony even though the Tashkent dialect lacks it.

I think that, in some ways, the Uzbek written language may be the "simplest" Turkic language for foreigners to learn, precisely because of the lack of vowel harmony, but the differences between the written version and the various spoken varieties complicates things.

I paid a very short visit to Tashkent again in 2001, but haven't been back since, so I'm not sure as to the current state of the alphabet aspect. Per my understanding, they were introducing the current Latin script to schoolchildren one year at a time, while adults all used Cyrillic, which was very well established and also common with Russian, so I don't know to what extent most adults really switched over to the Latin alphabet. I would imagine that it's pretty well-established by now, but have no recent personal experience to judge by. (When I first visited Tashkent, they were just introducing a different Latin alphabet, closer to the version used in Turkey and Azerbaijan, which had a number of diacritical marks on the Latin letters. They later switched to the current rather strange one, which uses digraphs for a number of consonants and the apostrophe as the only real diacritical mark. I hardly ever saw examples of the earlier Latin alphabet when I was there in the mid-1990s, though, apart from a few one-word signs over doors of businesses, and in a couple of booklets I bought to teach it to schoolchildren and adults.)

Edited by daristani on 25 August 2015 at 2:04am



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