My plan was to write about Modern Hebrew tonight. I changed my mind at the last minute though for personal reasons. Right now I’m trying to force myself to focus on Turkish. My adventure with this language started in 2009. I have a good Mongolian friend who speaks both Turkish and his native Mongolian. Although I was interested in learning Turkish because of its sounds and exoticness, I would have probably never gotten around to it if it were not for him. He wanted someone to speak Turkish with as he felt that his skills were atrophying owed to not using the language outside of listening to music and watching some online television shows. My initial thoughts were that Turkish would be extremely difficult for a Westerner to master, but I so far I have found the grammar to be quite logical. To my surprise I encountered several easy aspects in Turkish. The alphabet is phonetic. The grammatical cases are relatively easy. Some words are derived from others by adding affixes to a base term. The sound of the language sounds really playful too. These are some of my favorite things about the language. Some of the harder parts of the language include word order (syntax) and the vowel harmony that is so prevalent in the language.
Here are a few facts about verbs:
They tend to have the endings –mak and –mek depending on vowel harmony.
In order to see how verbs form it is necessary to know the personal pronouns. They are as following:
- Ben = I
- Sen = you (informal)
- O = he, she, it
- Biz = we
- Siz = you (plural, formal)
- Onlar = they
Verbs are formed in the present continuous tense by using the present ending of “to be”. This form of the present is used for the simple present in the spoken language too.
I’m going to conjugate a verb in the present continuous tense now.
Bakmak – to look
Ben bak-i-yorum : I look, I am looking
Sen bak-i-yorsun : You (inf.) look, you are looking
O bak-i-yor : he, she, it looks, he, she, it is looking
Biz bak-i-yoruz : we look, we are looking
Siz bak-i-yorsunuz : you (plural, formal) look, you are looking
Onlar bak –i-yorlar : they look, they are looking
*Notice that there is an “I” between the root bak- and the rest of the verb. This “I” doesn’t mean anything. It is just put there to keep the language’s rhythm. Turkish doesn’t like to have too many consonants near one another. This isn’t the best verb to use, but it’s late and I was too lazy to think of anything else. Note also that I am not an expert at this language. I haven’t studied it since the beginning of February as I had to stop because of classes at the university.
Here are some other verbs that end in the –mak and –mek forms. The endings above apply to all of the verbs in this respective tense.
Durmak: to stop
Okumak: to read
Konuşmak: to speak or to talk
Vermek: to give
Gitmek: to go
Içmek: to smoke
