6.15.2006

Take one off my bottom ten

Welp, number six has been removed from my bottom ten, if you remember reading that post. Number six was… Turkish. I didn’t give those people enough credit. I like the organization and feel of the language. It’s highly agglutinative, and has NO IRREGULAR VERBS and ALL nouns follow the EXACT same pattern. Also no articles.
Agglutinative means that it’s similar to Finnish or Hungarian, and doesn’t use specific words or prepositions or other things to create meanings, but rather that a base word has prefixes, suffixes, or infixes that give the base noun it’s meaning, so things like “into the house,” away from the house,” (and more things than just prepositional phrases) could be one word and carry the meaning of many individual ones, because you build from one thing, and add to it. An entire sentence in English involving a subject, verb of being and either some predicate adjectives or predicate nominatives can be translated as one (sometimes extremely long) word. It sounds confusing, but it’s incredibly precise and logical. The language doesn’t seem as icky to me as it once did. This is why.
I met a woman in service who speaks it. My brother actually spoke with her first and called me and told me where she lived. She said she was living with her brother, who also speaks Armenian, and I was able to say some things to her in Turkish, like “I apologize,” or “nice to meet you,” and “What is your name,” and “My name’s The Polyglot.” She was no taller than about 4’10” and was incredibly buff, but had the mentality of the sweetest grandmotherly housekeeper type. She was delightful.
I’ve also been podcasting, and because I haven’t had a lot of time to search for/organize these things into logical sequences yet, I haven’t been hunting for a whole bunch of language aids, specifically Chinese and Russian. What I’ve been doing instead is getting news broadcasts in foreign languages, so I’ve got a half-hour news story in Finnish, another in Hungarian, a wannabe “Entertainment Tonight,” episode in Italian, some Persian folktales, an Icelandic news story, as well as some really large audio files of online restaurant review magazines in French, based out of Montreal.
Anyway, that’s all for now. I’ve got to go learn some more Turkish. And work. And have breakfast.
(Also, a Turkish accent sounds somewhat like Russian if you really don’t listen, but it’s got some sounds that are a little too Arabicky to sound similar enough to a Slavic language. Her English accent also sounds Slavic, and I asked her if she spoke Russian. That was a no-go.) Turkish is an Altaic language, and is therefore related to most of the –stan country languages: Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, (NOT Pakistan), and even Mongolian (no –stan) are all Altaic languages. Some linguists are dead set certain that Korean has its roots as an Altaic language, but this is mostly looked upon in the linguistic world as people believing the moon is made of cheese. Turkish is the largest and most practical of the Altaic language family, and the subgroup is none other than Turkic… who’da thunkit?
So Turkish is being replaced as number six by a new addition: Hmong

1 comment:

Horse N. Buggy said...

I used to work with a Turkish girl. When I overheard her speaking in Turkish, I always felt like I should understand some of the words because they sounded similar to Russian. I'm glad it's not just me that noticed a similarity.