Looking back at the Pan Opto video on Blackboard I recorded, I do not think much has changed from then until now. This is largely because I am not studying Turkish at the moment. One thing has changed, and I should have expected it. My two friends in Baku seem, only naturally to be half a world away. And I, no doubt, to them seem equally distant. With no real prospects of seeing each other again, our relationships have become the dysfunctional occasional "how are you" and "nasıl hayatın." Thus, if things go as they have gone, there is reason to believe they will not be an aid to my language learning. The section of this course on phonetics has helped advance my language goals more than any other aspect. The letters Ö and Ü were particularly difficult for me to pronounce before hand. However, with the visual paradigm of vowels, I have since been able to pronounce them more or less accurately. Beyond this, I do not believe I have made any progress on my language goals. I am very familiar with the basics of Turkish history and culture, indulging the language and its history. Thus far, this course has been largely a review and an opportunity to look at already attained knowledge through different ways of thinking. This is not because of a lacking in the course content, but the fact that I am not presently engaged in studying Turkish. I have no doubt I am loosing my communicative competence daily. The up-side is that I will be taking Turkish in the Spring, which means that by next summer I will not have neglected my Turkish studies for a full year.
The relationship between language and culture is a relationship of set and superset. Language is a component, and expression, of culture and thus culture would not be everything it is without language. To improve my communicative competence, I need to 1) learn more words, especially words that are used in particular contexts such as historical writing and 2) understand more complicated grammatical structures. Beyond these goals lies the particular ways in which Turkish people use these forms to make meaning. A basic example is oturmak, which literally means to sit, but can also mean to stay or live, as in "I have been staying in Istanbul for two years,'' ''Iki yıldan beri İstanbul'da oturuyordum.''
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Interesting post, Chris. You should by all means continue to study Turkish even if you are enrolled in just SDLC 105! There are numerous resources at your disposal. You are welcome to peruse the entire collection of reserve items in the Global Studio, https://globalstudio.libib.com/, and there are a range of free digital platforms to help you retain your communicative abilities, including Drops, Mango, DuoLingo, iTalki, etc. You're also always welcome to make suggestions for additional subscriptions and acquisitions.
Regarding the relationship between language and culture, are there any Turkish cultural values that may have been shaped or influenced by the language? The paradigm of set and superset may be convenient to conceptualize language as a part of culture, but it perhaps does not adequately express the causal relationship of change and mutual development. These insights will continue to expand with your study of Turkish grammar. Are there specific grammatical concepts that you are especially eager to learn?
Language study is a very time consuming activity. Presently, I cannot responsibly allow it any time, owing to the nagging presence more consequential competitors like graded classes, applications, a relationship, and the desire for sustenance. Turkish sits on the back burner because I cannot reserve time for it. With the coming of the next semester, however, I will be able to reserve time for it as it will be 3.5 of the 12.5 credits I will be taking; it will be part of, not an addition to, my normal workload.
Language politics is particularly interesting in the case of Turkish. The change in script creates a situation in which most people cannot read what was written a hundred years ago. Imagine if we could not read Emily Dickinson or Mark Twain and you will understand this. Kemalism, the movement in which these language reforms were devised, spoke in the language of Orientalism and wanted to distance itself from its "oriental" and culturally mixed past toward a more European-like notion of Turkishness. The goal was the complete Turkification of the language by expelling all words of "oriental" origin. This goal was ultimately not met, as many "oriental" words remained in use. The resilience of Arabic and Persian words in the presence of purging Turkification seems to represent the culture. The durability of Islamic institutions and the resurgence of outward expression of Muslimness in Turkey seems to be of a similar vein. It is strange to me to think of language structure itself as an expression of culture. Perhaps vowel harmony may reflect a latent Islamic desire to have a harmonious universe, or perhaps it is simply an aesthetic reflection of cultural preference. I would explain most other things as unconscious development. I doubt the people who created agglutination knew what they were doing when they added suffixes to a root or referenced a particular pillar of their culture to justify the development. I also have little doubt that the vocabulary of a language describes that which is present in the culture in which it is employed. Surely we can say culture influences language here. In grammar, however, I believe it was an unconscious development and that particular structures do not reflect the values of a culture. Further, I would argue, cultures change faster than languages. Pre-Islamic Turkic probably is closer to modern Turkish than the pre-Islamic Turkic-speakers are to modern Turkish-speakers. I would say a significant way language has influenced Turkish culture is by providing a past to Turkish speakers, a kind of creation myth that extends before Islam. This past and its lack of Islamicness has been politicized into a secular identity with the Sun Language theory and idea of Anatolian origin of Turkish people. Even the theory of modern Mongolia as a place of origin of Turkic-speaking peoples offers such an alternative identity, one that has some distance from Islam. The language, however changed it may be from pre-Islamic times, is the strand of continuity on which identity can be formed.