I love learning about the history of languages and which languages have influenced one another because it adds so much more context to language learning. In the case of Turkish, I know that Turkish has a lot of Arabic words imported into the language, and that Hindi has taken a lot of Turkish words. One day while I was studying pronouns, it occurred to me that Bengali and Turkish have the same pronouns to refer to he/she, 'o'. I was really surprised by it as it was an unexpected discovery. Moreover, both Bengali and Turkish don't have gender. These similarities piqued my interest furthermore; unfortuntely when I did research to see the correlation, I could not find anything. I will keep searching, however!
Turkish dates back 5,500-8,500 years. It is in the Turkic language family and spoken in parts of Asia and Europe (Such as in Cyprus, Northern Cyprus, Greece, Iran, Bosnia). It also belongs to the Ural-Altaic family of the Altaic branch and is closely related to Mongolian, Korean, and potentially Japanese. This language family has the following features in common: vowel harmony, lack of gender, agglutination, adjectives preceding nouns, and verbs placed at the end of sentences.
With the influence of Islam, the Kara-Khanid Khanate and Sejluk Turks took a lot of Persian and Arabic loanwords for their administrative language. Not only that, but this extended to Turkish literature, especially in the Ottoman period. Historically, the official language of Turkish in this period (1299-1922) is called "Ottoman Turkish" (mixture of Turkish, Persian, and Arabic). This was similar to the language of prestige because it was unintelligible to the average Turk who spoke "rough Turkish" or kaba Türkçe as they say in Turkish. Rough Turkish is closest to the modern Turkish spoken today. Ottoman Turkish changed with the establishment of Turkey under Ataturk and the Turkish Language Association in 1932. The association sought to replace the aforementioned Arabic and Persian loanwords and purify Turkish by beginning a language reform. In doing this, many "new" words were derived from Turkic roots, but when an equivalent could not be found, Old Turkish unused for centuries were utilized.
As a result of this change, there was a shift in older and younger generations' vocabulary. Generations born before the 1940s continued speaking in Ottoman Turkish while the younger generations used the updated/purified modern Turkish.
Fun fact: In 1927, Ataturk's speech to the new Parliament needed to be "translated" to later generations a total of three different periods (1963, 1986, and 1995) because his Ottoman Turkish was so archaic to the listeners.
Source: http://www.turkishculture.org/literature/language-124.htm
Comments