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Why does the Turkish language sound so weird?
- Thread starter Totem
- Start date
Well it's an agglutinative language like Japanese, so you're partially right when you say it's similar to Japanese.
"Agglutinative languages" form words by joining suffixes and prefixes together. Which typically gives you very long, multi-syllable words that sound kind of disjointed. Eg: "vazgeçilemezlerindendir" meaning "indispensable".
As for it "sounding weird", that's all a matter of perspective. As a Turk, English sounded very strange to me when I first heard it.
"Agglutinative languages" form words by joining suffixes and prefixes together. Which typically gives you very long, multi-syllable words that sound kind of disjointed. Eg: "vazgeçilemezlerindendir" meaning "indispensable".
As for it "sounding weird", that's all a matter of perspective. As a Turk, English sounded very strange to me when I first heard it.
Well it's an agglutinative language like Japanese, so you're partially right when you say it's similar to Japanese.
"Agglutinative languages" form words by joining suffixes and prefixes together. Which typically gives you very long, multi-syllable words that sound kind of disjointed. Eg: "vazgeçilemezlerindendir" meaning "indispensable".
As for it "sounding weird", that's all a matter of perspective. As a Turk, English sounded very strange to me when I first heard it.
"Agglutinative languages" form words by joining suffixes and prefixes together. Which typically gives you very long, multi-syllable words that sound kind of disjointed. Eg: "vazgeçilemezlerindendir" meaning "indispensable".
As for it "sounding weird", that's all a matter of perspective. As a Turk, English sounded very strange to me when I first heard it.
There's a theory that Turkish is related to Japanese. The family it's in consists of languages spoken across Central Asia, including Mongolian, so that's not as absurd as it might sound since clearly Mongolia is relatively close to Japan (compared to Turkey). I think what you're hearing which sounds like Japanese is the central "i" sound, which is exactly the same as the Japanese sound written in our alphabet as "u". It isn't generally that similar to Japanese because unlike Japanese, two consonants can occur next to each other and it has what's called "vowel harmony", where particular types of vowel have to occur together in a word. However, it's also thought that Japanese may have had this feature once. Turkish also lacks the "whispered" vowels which can be heard in Japanese.
The other thing, which is not obvious to someone who can't understand it, is that both languages have very similar word order, putting the verb at the end of a phrase, and both tend to use single syllables after nouns to indicate position. In fact they do generally have a lot in common, but they also share these features with other languages which are not closely related such as Tamil.
The other thing, which is not obvious to someone who can't understand it, is that both languages have very similar word order, putting the verb at the end of a phrase, and both tend to use single syllables after nouns to indicate position. In fact they do generally have a lot in common, but they also share these features with other languages which are not closely related such as Tamil.