SDLC 105: Learning Journal 2

[Tenaya Bien]

The linguistic aspects of Turkish that I have found are: vowel harmony, lack of noun classes and grammatical gender, agglutination, and formal versus informal language. Vowel harmony, which we have gone over very briefly in 110, means that the vowels in a word or phrase are corresponding. So for example, in the country name of Germany, Almanya, all the vowels are "a". This also means that since "a" is a "thick sound" letter, when you tack on the ending to say that you are from Almanya you have to use an ending that is also a thick sound vowel. We haven't learned about noun classes yet, or really about grammatical order other than that it is a different order than in English. Agglutination means that you just take the basic word and tack on suffixes to make it a verb or a simple phrase. For example, to say "what is your name?" you say "Adin ne?". The "n" signifies "your", but the response is "Adim [your name]". The change of "n" to "m" signifies the change of "your" name to "my" name. And lastly, the informal and formal language is again differentiated usually by a change in ending.