The pronunciation rules are really interesting to me since each language has a different rule, but they share some similarities at the same time. Different from many other counties which use the international phonetic alphabet, Chinese use totally different rules, Pinyin. Basically, you need to remember the pronunciation of every Chinese character. In English, each word is composed of letters, and each letter has its pronunciation. When those English letters are combined together to form words, you could pronounce the words based on some pronunciation rules even though you do not know the meaning of the words. However, it is totally different in Chinese. In Chinese, if you do not know a character, there is no way that you could guess the pronunciation of the character based on some pronunciation rules. This is the reason why even some Chinese do not know how to pronounce some really unusual and difficult characters.
From this viewpoint, Turkish is more like English. In other words, both Turkish and English are phonetic language, which means that they are spoken hey way they are written, and vise verse. To accomplish that, in 1928 Atatürk introduced a phonetic variant of the Latin alphabet. The letters Q, W, and X were removed and 7 new, rather exotic looking characters were introduced: ç, ğ, ş, ö, ü and ı (undotted i). As a result, the Turkish alphabet consists of 29 letters — eight vowels and twenty-one consonants. Thus, the Turkish pronunciation rule is not overall unfamiliar to me, since the pronunciations of Turkish letters are similar to those of English letters. Actually, the pronunciations of Turkish letters are actually even more easy than those of English, since each English letter may have several different pronunciations, depending on the combination. However, every Turkish letter only has one pronunciation, and they pronounce every letter.
Comments
Interesting post, Nicole, but please be careful to avoid conflating sound and spelling. Letters are not sufficient to represent sound. When describing sounds, it's important to try to approximate the aural quality of the segment using transcriptions in the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA)-
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:IPA_chart_2018.pdf.
Also, phones are usually indicated with brackets.