Re: Turkish

[Robin Turner <robin@BILKENT.EDU.TR>]

>Robin Turner wrote:
>> Turkish is indeed weird in this respect, using
>> repetition of the verb with two different participles e.g.
>>
>> gel - ip   gel- me - diG -  i   -    ni    bil- mi-  yor -  um
>> come-PART. come-NEG.-PART.-3dP.SING-ACC.   know-NEG.-PROG.- 1stP.SING
>> "I don't know if he came."
>>
>> Tourist brochures or teach-yourself books which say Turkish is easy to
>> learn because it is "so regular" are having you on!
>
Ivan wrote:
>It only looks difficult or weird because you are misparsing it.
>Your approach isn't exactly malglico, but it's mabla unTurkish.
>
>Remember that Turkish inflects phrases, not words.  Instead of
>_[gel-ip] [gelme-dik]-i-ni_ (with intervocalic _k_ > _g`_), try
>_[gel-ip gelme]-dik-i-ni_.  It's a single nominalisation, except
>it's formed from a conjunction of two verbs, and that means using
>a non-final form (here an _-ip_-gerund) of the first verb.
>
.ua  Should have thought of that.  I must admit I hardly ever look at
reference grammars of Turkish and haven't used a textbook since the early
days of learning the language (largely because most refgrams and textbooks
are so bad) - I usually just pick things up by ear, analyse them, then ask
native speakers questions to check my intuitions (a sort of structuralist
approach, I suppose).  One problem is that IMHO terms like "gerund",
"participle" etc. fit Altaic languages about as well as they fit Lojban.  I
usually call "-ma-" and "-dik-" "verbal nouns" (since they inflect) but I'm
not sure what one should call "-ip-" - certainly not a gerund. It's
normally a bit like a completive aspect, I think, though this obviously
wouldn't fit this particular usage - a case of automorphism, perhaps?

I stubbornly maintain that Turkish *is* difficult to learn, especially if
your native tongue is not agglutinative. OK, the grammar is mainly just a
matter of piling on suffixes, but it stopped being as regular as people
make out after Arabic-speaking intellectuals got their hands on it.  Even
our ex-P.M. Tansu Ciller makes mistakes (e.g. "ihanetlik").  Also I find
the pragmatics diabolical, but that's more of a cultural than a linguistic
problem.

BTW, can you shed any light on Lojbab's "her/bUtUn" question? I'm stumped
at the moment - I usually know which is the right one to use, but I sure as
hell can't explain why.

Anyway, if anyone wants to continue this string, I suggest we do it by
individual e-mail, or Lojban-list will get even more cluttered than it
already is!


Robin Turner

Bilkent Universitesi,
IDMYO,
Ankara,
Turkey.

<http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Delphi/8309>