Turkish shares much of its phonetic qualities with English. However, it has an arguably shorter range of sound owing to the generally true rule that Turkish letters have one sound. An example of this is that A is always pronounced in the same way. The consonants are likewise mono-phonetic. That which is most striking about the Turkish alphabet is the vowels that do not exist in English, Ö (ø) and Ü (y). Although these letters technically do not exist in English, English speakers make them unconsciously in speech. This is because Ö and O and Ü and U, in Turkish distinct sounds corresponding to a distinct letter, are in English they are two ways of saying the same letter. This makes distinguishing and sounding out these letters particularly difficult for an English speaker, evidently, even one with an intermediate-mid level of speech-competency. Likewise, there are two variants of I, I (ɯ) and İ (i). Other letters such as C may be deceiving. C is not C as in car, but C as in jam or jewel. Some sounds English often requires two letters to express are expressed in single letters, Ç (tʃ) and Ş (ʃ) being examples. Another difference between Turkish and English is the existence of what could be called an anti-phone in the former. Ğ, called “soft ge” usually occurs when a particular kind of suffix is added to a word ending with K, supposedly to make the word come more smoothly off the tongue. This letter is not said and is indicated by emphasizing the following vowel. However, again, most letters phonetically correspond to their English counterparts. I require a bit more practice on the U’s and O’s, but, otherwise, I know the sounds well.
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Interesting post, Chris. Please remember that phonetic segments are usually indicated with brackets, e.g. [i]. This may seem like a minor point, but the notation becomes increasingly important to differentiate between phones, phonemes, and morphemes. More on this next week. While you've included several symbols from the International Phonetic Alphabet, there is still some conflation here of sound and spelling. What IPA symbols would be the closest aural approximations of the segments identified in your post?
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/8e/IPA_chart_2018.pdf