“Modern Turkish” is meant to be phonetic, so spelling is easily guessed from pronunciation and vice versa. Turkish has 28 phonemes and is based on a vowel harmony, which means that vowels will mostly be in the front or back and rounded or unrounded. Velar consonants are (k,g) palletized to c and j, which is similar to Russian, which is really interesting. There are also no diphthongs in the standard Turkish dialect, which are sounds formed by two vowels in a syllable (Wikipedia gives the example of coin, side). The Turkish alphabet has 29 letters and does not use Q, W, and X, but uses Ç. It is also common However, the alphabet is very similar.
To me, the most interesting thing is that in Turkish, every letter is pronounced, unlike English (and uncommon for many other languages too).
For example: ekmek is pronounced “ecˈmec” and hafta is “hafta”. Turkish does have a letter Ğ, which is a soft G, which has no sound on it’s own. Ağaç is pronounced “ɑ.ɑtʃ”, öğrenci is phonetically “øʝɾendʒi”, without the g, rather it modifies the preceding vowel.
Since the language is phonetic, my main challenge will be able to listen for certain letters and correctly memorize the sounds of each letter in order to do so. I still struggle with mixing up i and ı. I can only become better at listening and writing once I actually have a good hang at the alphabet. Once I am able to do so, I will want to listen to audio pronunciations to able grasp words and certain pronunciations. The IPA phonetic spelling is hard for me to follow, so being able to rely on an online dictionary audio recording will help me understand how to pronounce words much better. I still do this for Chinese and Russian often, so I know I will do this for Turkish too.
Comments