Discussion Post #6

[Tianhui Qiu]

I always love to know the history of one language and how it relates to other languages. I know Turkish belongs to the Altaic language family, and Mongolian does too because they share noteworthy similarities in vocabulary, morphological and syntactic structure, and certain phonological features. But I found it a little shocking because I have Mongolian friends, and what they write and speak is really different from Turkish. Mongolian has much more complicated letters. But I think it was more challenging to understand maybe because I studied English as my second language and letters like these look more “normal” to me. In the beginning, I felt Turkish sounds like Japanese, but after doing some research, I found they are totally different from each other, and the most similar language to Turkish is Azerbaijani. After learning some basic Turkish, I found that French and Turkish shared a lot in common. For example, they both have six subjects, and suffix in the verb would change with the subjects. Also, the letter “j” in Turkish pronounces precisely the same as French and Turkish uses “Merci” as thank you. So based on my previous experience in studying French, Turkish is becoming easier to learn for me. However, I am not sure whether they are from the same location or language at the very beginning of history because I think it is more like Turkish borrowed these from French, and my language partner also said so. And the other day Chet and I found the way to say “hello” in Turkish and Arabian is very similar because, in Turkish, it is “Merhaba” while in Arabian, it is “Marhaban”. It is also very similar to the phenomenon mentioned in the article that different languages shared similar ways to say “mother” because those cognates are derived from the proto-Indo-European word “mehter.”