Turkey has an extensive history marked by various cultural and linguistic interactions that have shaped the Turkish language that exists today. Turkish belongs to the Turkic language family, which includes languages like Azerbaijani, Uzbek, Uyghur, Turkmen, Kazakh, and many others. Some of the defining features of these languages are vowel harmony, agglutination and the absence of gendered nouns. Turkish has been postulated to be an Altaic or Uralic language with possible ties to Mongolian, Japanese and Korean, but the language's more distant origins are still in contention.
Contact with other languages through trade, missionaries/spread of religion, and tourism typically influence language changes. Turkey, because of its heavy trade traffic throughout history and its location connecting Europe and Asia, has been impacted by many foreign influences. Because of the extensive rule of the Ottoman Empire and the adoption of Islam, Turkish has a notable amount of loan words from Arabic and Persian. Arabic and Persian loan words are sometimes identifiable if the vowel harmony in the word is not consistent (example 1) or if there are two vowels adjacent to each other (ex. 2). Turkish has some French loan words as well from the Franco-Ottoman alliance in 1536, the increasing number of French-educated Ottoman Turks during this period, and the construction of the Orient Express connecting Paris to Istanbul in the 1800's (ex. 3). Turkey's extensive use of French loan words was likely further enabled by the Turkish language reform in the early 1900's where Turkish began to use the Latin alphabet. However, this reform also included actions to replace loan words with Turkish words.
Example 1:
"Fakir" is a loan word from Arabic that means "poor." Typical Turkish vowel harmony is not used in this word ("a" is usually followed by "ı" in Turkish, but in this case "a" precedes "i").
Example 2:
"Saat" (clock) is an Arabic loan word. The two "a's" strung together are unusual in Turkish.
Example 3:
"Doküman" is the Turkish word for "document" and comes from the French word "document."
The many cultural factors that have impacted the Ottoman Empire (and thus Turkey) have left marks in the Turkish language. Realizing how a language is connected to other languages tells us that these languages were once related and have deviated from each other over time through various means. Knowing the relationships between languages might make a language easier to learn if you already know a language related to your target language.
Linguists oftentimes use statistics, linguistic evidence and biological evidence (demographics that are more biologically similar might suggest that at one point they consisted of the same group of people who spoke the same language) to extrapolate and predict language changes. This includes analyzing syntax/grammar, comparing words in languages that are less subject to change, using evolutionary genetics, and considering other factors like history, geography and cultural contact. Many facets and techniques involved in determining the evolution of languages need to be considered to accurately depict how languages are interconnected.
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