History
The Turkish language belongs to the Altaic language group (league) and to the family of Turkic languages. The oldest discovered scripts are dated to be created around 7th-10th century A.D. in the lands of Middle Asia, and by then it was not written with the Latin alphabet yet, and the written language was significantly different from the form used while speaking. This language is used in Europe and Asia by circa 83 million people.
Structure and pronunciation
The inhabitants of Turkey and many other countries, who speak Turkish are currently using the Latin alphabet, somewhat adjusted to the needs of the language and its phonetics. There have been added signs such as: Ş (pronounced in English as ‘sh’), Ç (pronounced in English as ‘tsh’), with Ö and Ü known from German. A little curiosity is the use of a mute letter Ğ, which itself represents no sound, however it functions as an indicator for the preceding vowel to be of stretched sound.
The Turkish language differs from the English one also by the method of formation of the words, because we, in our native language use analytic constructions, and in the country on the shore of the Black Sea, exists so called ‘agglutination’. The term means ‘gluing together ‘and this basically is what happens during a creation of an utterance. We ‘glue’ suffixes sequentially to the core word to endow it with a context, while holding onto the order of subject-object-verb.
Curiosities
On the lands of the Turkish province of Giresun exists kuş dili, which means ‘birds language’ and is used by a handful of people to the present day as a form of communication with the use of a range of complicated whistles, reflecting the spoken language with their structure. Such method of passing information makes it possible to communicate over surprisingly long distances, reaching a few kilometres.
A temple, often being considered a symbol associated with Turkey, namely Hagia Sophia, towering with its impressive (56m in height) size over the architecture of Istanbul, was at first a building erected in the 4th century by the Christians, and only later (in the middle of the 15th century) enriched with 4 minarets and turned into a full-fledged mosque, which it functions as until the present day.
There can be found words in English borrowed from Turkish up to this day. Those are words such as ‘Caracal’ (a species of feline, from tur. ‘Karakulak’), ‘Shish kebab’ (a type of meal, from tur. ‘şiş kebabı’), or even of as colloquial sound as ‘yogurt‘ (a dairy product, form tur. ‘yoğurt’).
Turkey is one of the most popular destinations for tourists from around the globe. And it is not without a reason, because both the architecture and geography of this country can prove to be breath-taking to anyone who decides to go there for the first time, and, as the regular visitors would probably say, it is so for every other time. Everyone who desires to experience a new culture and create wonderful memories, should definitely mark Turkey on his/hers itinerary.
(translation F.S.)
