Discussion Post #6

[Yahui Wu]

Base on my knowledge about Turkish, I know that Turkish is widely used in Southeast Europe and Western Asia. Outside Turkey, with the immigration, Turkish expanded to Germany, Bulgaria, Greece, and etc.
Therefore, it is a widely used language over the whole world. Also, Turkish belongs to the Turkic family, which includes some 30 living languages spoken across Eastern Europe, Central Aisa and Siberia. All languages in the Turkic family share some common characteristics. Specifically, The basic word order of Turkish is subject-object-verbs. Turkish has no noun-classes or grammatical gender. The language has a strong t-v distinction and usage of honorifics. Turkish uses second-person pronouns that distinguish varying levels of politeness, social distance, age, courtesy or familiarity toward the addressee. Despite the fact that there is no historical connection or valid interrelationship between Japanese and Turkish, I still found that those two languages share a lot of similarities. First of all, their grammar structures are pretty similar. Both are subject-object-verb structure. This feature is really different from English grammar, which is usually subject-verb-object. Also, both Turkish and Japanese are agglutinative, which means that complex words are formed by combining multiple morphemes. For example, "Çekoslovakyalılaştıramadıklarımızdanmışçasına" is treated as one word in Turkish, which means that as if you were one of those whom we could not make resemble the Czechoslovakian people. Since I have learned basic Japanese before, it is not difficult for me to absorb those rules and I can really take advantage of my Japanese learning experience, which gives me a good start and solid foundation.