Turkish: An Essential Grammar

Celia Kerslake, Asli Goksel

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781134042173
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Languages
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Turkish: An Essential Grammar is a concise, user-friendly guide to the most important structures of contemporary Turkish. Presenting a fresh and accessible description of the language, this engaging grammar uses clear, jargon-free explanations offering practical guidance on understanding and constructing words and sentences correctly.

Chapter 1

The alphabet and pronunciation

1.1	The Turkish alphabet

The alphabet contains 29 letters. Below we give a basic guide for the pronunciation of each letter. Pronunciation will be discussed in more detail in the subsequent sections.

‘a’, ‘A’	as the u in ‘shut’
‘b’, ‘B’	as the b in ‘bet’
‘c’, ‘C	as the j in ‘jet’
‘ç’, ‘Ç’	as the ch in ‘chat’
‘d’, ‘D’	as the d in ‘deer’
‘e’, ‘E’	as the e in ‘pen’
‘f’, ‘F’	as the f in ‘fact’
‘g’, ‘G’	as the g in ‘go’
‘ğ’, ‘Ğ’	silent
‘h’, ‘H’	as the h in ‘heavy’
‘ı’, ‘İ’	as the a in ‘among’
‘i’, ‘I’	as the i in ‘sit’
‘j’, ‘J’	as the s in ‘leisure’
‘k’, ‘K’	as the k in ‘keep’
‘l’, ‘L’	as the l in ‘leave’, ‘all‘, ‘lurid’
‘m’, ‘M’	as the m in ‘make’
‘n’, ‘N’	as the n in ‘net’
‘o’, ‘O’	as the o in ‘off’
‘ö’, ‘Ö’	as the German sound ö
‘p’, ‘P’	as the p in ‘pet’
‘r’, ‘R’	produced by touching the tip of the tongue on the medial part of the palate
‘s’, ‘S’	as the s in ‘hiss‘
‘ş’, ‘Ş’	as the sh in ‘sharp’
‘t’, ‘T’	as the t in ‘tea’
‘u’, ‘U’	as the u in ‘put’
‘ü’, ‘Ü’	as the German sound ü
‘v’, ‘V’	as the v in ‘verse’
‘y’, ‘Y’	as the y in ‘yoke’
‘z’, ‘Z’	as the z in ‘zap’

There is a much stronger correspondence between the letters and sounds in Turkish than there is in English, but there are some cases where a letter corresponds to more than one sound. These will be described in the sections below.

1.2	Consonants

Turkish consonants

‘b’, ‘c’, ‘ç’, ‘d’, ‘f, ‘g’, ‘ğ’, ‘h’, ‘j’, ‘k’, ‘l’,
‘m’, ‘n’, ‘p’, ‘r’, ‘s’, ‘ş’, ‘t’, ‘v’, ‘y’, ‘z’

• Some of these consonants are pronounced the same everywhere. These are ‘b’, ‘c’, ‘d’, ‘j’, ‘m’, ‘s’, ‘ş’, ‘y’ and ‘z’.

• The pronunciation of some consonants varies just a little, depending on what sounds precede and/or follow them. However, the audibility of these differences varies from one speaker to another. These letters are ‘ç’, ‘p’, ‘t’, ‘f and ‘v’.

‘ç’, ‘k’, ‘p’ and ‘t’ are pronounced with less air when they are followed by another consonant than when they are followed by a vowel, and with most air when there are no other words following them. For example, the last letter (‘t’) in Masayı şu duvara it! ‘Push the table towards that wall!’ is pronounced with a stronger air release than the ‘t’ in iterim ‘I will push [it]’, which, in turn, has more air release than the ‘t’ in Gitsen iyi olur ‘You should go...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Abbreviations and other notation used in this book
• Chapter 1 The alphabet and pronunciation
• Chapter 2 Spelling and punctuation
• Chapter 3 Forming words and compounds
• Chapter 4 The noun and the noun phrase
• Chapter 5 Adjectives, determiners, quantifiers
• Chapter 6 Numerals and numerical expressions
• Chapter 7 Adverbials
• Chapter 8 Postpositional phrases
• Chapter 9 Pronouns
• Chapter 10 Conjunctions
• Chapter 11 Basic sentence structure
• Chapter 12 Person marking in sentences
• Chapter 13 The copula: predicates with -y- (‘be’) and ol- (‘be’/‘have’)
• Chapter 14 Nominal sentences
• Chapter 15 Verbal sentences
• Chapter 16 The verb form
• Chapter 17 Modality
• Chapter 18 Questions
• Chapter 19 Word order and intonation
• Chapter 20 Relative clauses
• Chapter 21 Noun clauses
• Chapter 22 Adverbial clauses
• Chapter 23 Conditional sentences
• Chapter 24 Conversational features
• Appendix A Inflection of nouns
• Appendix B Inflection of nominal predicates
• Appendix C Overview of verbal inflection
• Appendix D Inflection of verbs
• Appendix E Marking of subordinate clauses
• Appendix F Verbs taking oblique objects
• Appendix G Commonly used verbs that take noun clause objects
• Appendix H Nouns of ethnicity and nationality; names of countries, regions and names of languages
• Appendix I Commonly used reduplicated words
• Appendix J List of conjunctions
• Appendix K Common Turkish abbreviations
• Glossary of grammatical terms
• Index