43
votes
Are the longest German and Turkish words really single words?
From the perspective of linguistics, the question is meaningless though well-intentioned. "Word" is not a well-defined technical concept in linguistics (or, some people may have concocted a ...
- 82k
42
votes
Accepted
Are Hungarian and Turkish related?
Turkish and Hungarian are typologically similar: They are both agglutinating languages with vowel harmony and rather rich vowel inventories.
They are, to our best knowledge, not genetically related. ...
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21
votes
Accepted
Reversal of kinship terms when speaking to a child
Is there a name for this phenomenon?
There are several in fact, but there doesn't seem to be a single unified term, which is quite a problem because it makes looking it up a real pain in the neck.
...
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18
votes
Is Turkish older than Bulgarian?
Rather than a direct answer, let me explain why it makes little sense to ask such a question. Current languages didn't appear at a distinct moment in time,[1] but rather it evolved gradually from an ...
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15
votes
In Turkish, regarding the locative, how do we know which suffix (-de or -da) should be used?
Turkish has a rule of vowel harmony: it depends on the vowel of the preceding syllable. You get [a] after u ı o a and [e] after ü i ö e. There are some complications about final consonants in loan ...
- 82k
14
votes
Are the longest German and Turkish words really single words?
In German, noun phrases that are used to describe a separate entity other than their individual nouns are written without spaces. Thus, the example of Kraftfahrzeug-Haftpflichtversicherung may indeed ...
- 251
14
votes
Accepted
Etymology of the Turkish word "rüzgâr"
The semantic shift seems to be: time > weather > wind
For the first step compare Latin tempus “time” > French temps (“time, weather”).
For the second compare German Wetter (“weather”) with ...
- 23.7k
12
votes
Are Hungarian and Turkish related?
Hungarian belongs to the Ugric subgroup of the Uralic language family, while Turkish belongs to the controversial Altaic language family. Nevertheless, Hungarian has had some kind of contact with ...
- 2,522
10
votes
Accepted
Turkish kalem: from Anc. Greek or Tocharian?
The Greek word kalamos “reed, reed pen, stylus” has a good Indo-European etymology (cognate with, for example, German Halm “reed”). It was borrowed not only in Arabic, as qalam, but also into Sanskrit ...
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10
votes
Accepted
Why is vowel length not considered phonemic in Turkish?
Linguists do understand that vowel length is phonemic in Turkish, but that understanding is probably not shared by Turkish speakers generally. The Turkish govt. dictionary does note the length of <...
- 82k
8
votes
Adjectives in Turkish always comes before the noun?
Turkish is a typical head-final language which means that nouns, which are the heads of noun phrases (NP) and verbs which are the heads of verb phrases (VP) always come at the end of those phrases.
...
- 17.7k
7
votes
Reversal of kinship terms when speaking to a child
I wondered about this and answered my own question on the German StackExchange. The phenomenon exists in German dialects, but not Standard German (with the possible exception of Pate; see below). I ...
- 447
7
votes
Adjectives in Turkish always comes before the noun?
the house is nice is a sentence. Its equivalant is Ev güzeldir which is a sentence too. For convinience people say ev güzel. On the other hand güzel ev is not a complete sentence. Bu güzel evdir is a ...
- 492
7
votes
Are there traces of Old Turkish in ancient Germanic languages?
Old Turkish was spoken in what is now Mongolia and Xinjiang. These are very far from the areas where Old Germanic languages were spoken. There are no "traces" of Old Turkish in ancient Germanic, nor ...
- 23.7k
6
votes
Accepted
Turkish: the -DIK participles and an information loss
Your observation is correct and you're not missing anything. The original case information is simply lost with -DIK (and -(y)EcEK) participles. So is most of the original tense information by the way: ...
- 2,175
6
votes
Accepted
Is there a "maximal coda principle"?
The quoted sentence from the Wikipedia article isn't very clear, and I wouldn't be confident that the author knew what they were talking about.
Syllables and syllabification rules are very ...
- 17.8k
6
votes
How "üçün" is Turkic but "çün" is Iranic?
Turkic üçün is a postposition meaning “because of, on account of”. It is undeniably Turkic; see Clauson, Etym. dictionary of pre-13th-century Turkish, p. 28 seq.
Persian čūn is a conjunction meaning “...
- 23.7k
5
votes
Reversal of kinship terms when speaking to a child
"to my knowledge, it doesn't exist in English or French for example"
Actually, my father, born in a Francoprovençal village, often called me "mon petit père" or "mon gros père" (I used to be a chubby ...
- 99
5
votes
Turkish "Yaz" vs. Azerbaijani "Yaz"
I am not sure that there is any good explanation. Clauson’s Etymological dictionary writes that “there is utter confusion in the Turkish languages about the words for 'spring' and 'summer'”. Perhaps ...
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5
votes
Accepted
Plural form declension with numbers in Turkish
In Turkish, a plural declension is not needed if the noun is modified by a numeral.
(If it is used, it is emphatic.)
In fact, it is not needed with any modifier that already implies plural.
arkadaş (...
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5
votes
Accepted
Turkic etymology dictionary
Words are not cited as Persian or Avestan loans just because they are attested in texts. Iranic languages have loans as well. If an Iranic word (e.g. birādar 'brother' > Turkish biradar) is without ...
- 2,522
4
votes
most common Turkish words
A Frequency Dictionary of Turkish by Yeşim Aksan, Mustafa Aksan, Ümit Mersinli and Umut Ufuk Demirhan (Routledge, 2017) contains the 5,000 most common words in Turkish, based on a 50 million word ...
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4
votes
Etymology of the Turkish word for copper (bakır)
The root is not known. But for etymology I would recommend Misalli Büyük Türkçe Sözlük (It is online on kubbealtilugati.com .
According to it, bakır has been used since the old Turkic, but there are ...
- 492
4
votes
The reason for similarity of Turkic "min" and latin "mille", Turkic "dil" and dutch "taal"?
There are three reasons that words in different languages may sound similar:
Common origin;
Loans; and
Coincidence.
Common origin gives us series of related words. For instance, English "father" and ...
- 1,763
4
votes
Accepted
why is erdogan pronounced erdowan?
According to Zimmer & Orgun (1999, p. 155), the letter <ğ> has different pronunciation acording to its environment:
Word-finally and preconsonantally, it lengthens the preceding vowel.
Between ...
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4
votes
Can causative and anticausative co-occur in Turkish verbal morphology?
Definitely, it's especially common for certain verbs.
Bir ev tahliye ettirildi
Translation:
A house was evacuated
In Istanbul, following the past earthquake many houses cracked (sic.)...
- 735
4
votes
Accepted
Why does Latin, Turkish, and Albanian share common words?
There are three possible explanations:
Turkish has borrowed many words from other languages, just as has Albanian. I have been told courant d'air is actually a Turkish word (probably spelled the ...
- 7,956
4
votes
Accepted
Do Turkish sentences have to ever "fall back" to using extra words instead of using suffixes?
Yes, there are plenty of modifiers in Turkish that are standalone words, like prepositions and postpositions, not suffixes.
Often a similar idea can be expressed with either a suffix or a standalone ...
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4
votes
Do Turkish sentences have to ever "fall back" to using extra words instead of using suffixes?
I can't speak for Turkish, but I suspect your question is more general than that.
In some languages, these "suffixes" are case markers, which show agreement (so you basically put the marker ...
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