Turkish language belongs to Ural-Altaic family of languages. The Ural-Altaic languages are distinguished from the Indo-European by: the absence of gender, adjectives precede nouns and verbs come at the end of a sentence. Until 1928, Turkish was written in the Perso-Arabic script also known as the Ottoman Turkish alphabet.
Text in the Ottoman Turkish alphabet was written right to left. The appearance of the letter actually changed with the position of the letter. For example, the position could be:
- isolated (one letter word)
- medial (letter joined on both sides)
- final (the letter is joined on the right to the preceeding letter)
- initial (the letter is joined on the left to the following letter)
In the early years of the establishment of Republic Turkey and under the role of Turkish leader Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, numbers and letters that were written in Arabic were replaced with Latin alphabet. Transition from one alphabet to another one lasted only a few months. On January 1, 1929, it actually became unlawful to use the Arabic alphabet to write Turkish.
Today, Turkish alphabet consists of 29 letters and the letters that English alphabet does not have are: Ç, Ğ, I, İ, Ö, Ş, Ü
Ğ is silent- lengthens preceding vowel
I - e sound in label
İ - ee sound in bee
Ö- e sound in her
Ş- sh sound in ship
Ü- ew sound in few
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