While I have not yet started writing in Turkish, I am very grateful that Modern Turkish has transitioned to the use of the Latin alphabet. While this makes some words slightly unwieldy, it makes both typing and writing extremely easy. I believe writing would be especially simple, as many of the letters are the exact same as in English, and those that are different are just variations of English letters (with umlauts or other accent markings). However, if I wanted to type in Turkish I would have to become accustomed to another keyboard layout to include the different letters.
Forming sentences with Turkish, however, is much more difficult. Because Turkish is agglutinative, meaning a single word can express multiple ideas through the addition of morphemes onto that word, both creating the words themselves and then combining them into sentences can be challenging to a new speaker. The basic Turkish word order is subject, object, and then verb, with suffixes added on to the nouns and verbs to express who is doing things to verbs or who is owning a noun. For example, in Turkish, “Iyi” means “good” and “Iyiyim” means “I’m fine”. The added “-im” indicates ownership of the “good”, translating to “I am well”. Because in English, all parts of speech are separate (even when one typical part of speech is being used as another in the case of participles and gerunds), assigning a specific suffix that indicates a part of speech to a noun or verb in Turkish can seem strange and may hinder the ability to communicate in written contexts.
Clauses in Turkish are much different than in English. For example, whereas in English the tense of the verb can change inside a clause, in Turkish the verb always stays the same. If I wanted to say, “I see the man who is running”, the verb in that sentence is “koşan” meaning literally “who is run”. The complete sentence would be “Koşan adamı görüyorum”. However, if I wanted to say, “I will see the man who will run”, in Turkish, this is “Koşan adamı göreceğim”. The relative verb “koşan” stays the same, and an ending is added to the main verb in the sentence to indicative future tense for both verbs. The same occurs for the past tense. “I saw the man who ran” becomes “Koşan adamı gördüm”, with “koşan” once again staying constant as “who is run”.
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