This week I learned grammar rules in the Turkish language. First, I learned the vowel harmony in Turkish. For the front unrounded vowels, if the vowel preceding Is either “e” or “I”, the suffix vowel is “I”. For the front rounded vowels, if the vowel preceding is either “ö” or “ü”, then, the suffix vowel is “ü”. For the unrounded back vowels, if the vowel preceding is either “a” or” ī”, then the suffix vowel is “ī”. For the rounded back vowels, if the vowel preceding is “o” or “u”, then the suffix vowel is “u”.
I also learned how to transform words to their plural forms. The plural suffixes in Turkish are “-lar” and “-ler”. The vowel harmony is used in this rule as well, to determine which suffix to use. If the last vowel in a word ends in either “a”, “ī”, “o”, or “u”, the plural form of the word will end in the suffix, “-lar”. If the last vowel in a word ends in either “e”, “I”, “ö”, or “ü”, the plural form of the word will end in the suffix “-ler”. For example, araba means car in Turkish, and the last vowel in the word is a. Therefore, the plural form of the word, araba, is arabalar. Additionally, the word “kalem” means pen in Turkish. The last vowel in the word, kalem, is “e”. Therefore, the plural form of the word kalem, is kalemler.
I also learned how to ask and answer yes-no questions. In Turkish, yes-no questions are formed with the suffix “-mi”. If a question has the suffix “-mi”, it is understood that a yes-no question is being asked. For example, to ask the question, “is this a book?”, you would write “Bu bir kitap mī?”, To answer yes, you would say, “Evet, bu bir kitap”, which means “yes, this is.a book”. To answer no, you would say “Hayīr, bu bir kitap degil”, which means, No this is not a book. The word “degil” has a negative connotation. Whenever you hear the word degil, you can assume that the response was negative, or the opponent is responding with “no”.
I also learned how to ask regular questions. There are different question words. “what?” is “ne?”, “who?” is “kim?”, “which?” is “hangi”, “where is nere”, “when?” is “ne zaman?”, “how?” is “nasīl”, “how many?” is “kaç tane?”, “how much?” is “ne kadar?”, “how often?” is “ne sukhkla”. To construct a question sentence, you take the answer to the question and replace the word or phrase that is the actual answer to the question. In Turkish, a question sentence has the same word order as a regular sentence.
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I was just explaining the ne question to my partner. It is interesting how you can build meaning by adding suffixes to ne. Ne is what, but then add re and you get where, nere. Then you can add your choice of suffixes to add even further to the meaning. Nere+de is at where. Nere+den is from where. Nere+si is where as in a specific place. Nere+ye is to where. Nereye gidiyorsun?--To where are you going? Nereden geliyorsun?--From where are you coming? Etc.
Personally the way Hazal teaches vowel harmony (and most Turkish instructors teach it) doesn't help me very much. The other way of thinking about vowel harmony is in two and four way vowel harmony. Here are videos for each.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vhfCuYtnR2I&list=PLBv6B6E0IuHit...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_FFQQAB2ds4&list=PLBv6B6E0IuHit...