About a week ago there was a brief discussion about Turkish grammatical usage, which was followed by a briefer discussion about the origins of Turkish. During the extensive research I did for my book one of the most compelling stories was that of the great Turkish migration from an area around the Orkhon Valley in modern-day Mongolia to Anatolia. During the course of my research a mapping out of the Turkish language family helped put the migration into perspective. I'm one of those who believe that Turkish shares a common ancestor with the Altaic languages. A few examples are in order. Korean is an Altaic language (so is Japanese, but they hate being lumped in with the Koreans and vice-versa). Korean shares an agglutinative nature like that in Turkish, but as I recall, vowel harmony is not much of a component. I think the agglutination of Korean is the hardest single hurdle for a Westerner Native English speaker to overcome in learning the language. (It's really quite bizarre for our minds to understand the concept.) The alphabet is a cinch. Once learned you can never, ever, under any circumstances mispronounce or misspell a word, unlike English spelling! Cough? Doughnut? Ha!

Indulge me a short personal observation: I really dig the vowel harmony. There is this wonderful introductory intonation in Turkish when a conversation begins that is lovely to the ears. It isn't sing-song. And I haven't thought out the right analogy or metaphor yet. Regardless, I can't believe I missed this in 2007, but then again, I was a mess.

More after the jump.

Turkish also shares the subject-object-verb (SOV) word order common in Altaic languages. The verb comes at the end of the sentence. And the verb function is more about aspect than it is about tense. Is an action ongoing or completed, opposed to the designation of a specific time an action occurred as in English is much more important. (Russian is also a language of aspect, so aspect is not limited to non-Indo-European languages.) This creates problems in translation, even with really good English speakers and knowing there is a continuum of action being 'idealized' in the speakers head helps me understand what they are trying to convey. Odd, I know. But still this is what I do.

More important would be defining a word and the concept behind it; to put a face to the name, in a sense. The word in Turkish meaning "I don't have," is "yok." And it is a word you hear frequently.

It's like a simple declarative verb form in English, or so I've been led to believe and if the person who translated the literal meaning of the word is correct then that meaning is, "it doesn't exist." This is very, very similar in concept to the Korean "op-soyo," which means the exact same thing, "it doesn't exist," but is used colloquially to mean, "I don't or we don't have it." Similar concepts, expressed in similar verb forms across continents. Rather interesting no?

Okay, I know this is all a tad intellectual, but the linguistic structure and functions of languages--all languages--fascinate me. I mean, some of the structures in Arabic are amazing and share antecedents with sub-Saharan African languages. And Chinese? A language with many words that don't even have vowels! How can that not be worth a post or two?

Mostly, however, how a non-English brain contextualizes, processes and redistributes ideas, in my opinion, is a endlessly amazing topic, a rich vein of ore to mine over and over the course of one's life. And even though I don't have the discipline to sit down and learn another language learning how it functions is an important aid in learning more about the people I am visiting.

I wanted to add one last comment. The Turkish family language tree is divided into six groups: Oghuz, Kypchak, Uighur, Siberian, Oghur and Khalaj. Oghuz and Uighur are probably the two most common, widely spoken. Oghuz includes Modern Turkish, Azeri and Turkmen and all three are relatively mutually intelligible. Uighur includes Uzbek and Uighur. I was mistaken about Kyrgyz. It's from the Kypchak group. Kyrgyz sounds much more guttural, more Mongolian, in my opinion, which is a bizarre sounding language, like two cats, full of fur-balls, spitting at each other whilst trying to mate. I've tried pronouncing words in Mongolian and when I do it's laughable.

If you are interested in more, Wikipedia is an indispensable resource for this kind of major dorkage.