Latin and Turkish

[Anonymous]

hello there,

I know some latin from school and learned turkish in the last years. Is it because I don't remember latin properly, or do the two languages really have a lot in common?! I didn't find anything about it on the internet and there is no reasonable historical explanation for that stunning similarities.
Does any of you know both languages? what do you thing about it? am I dreaming?!

thanks

zippy

 

[Donaldus]

I don't know any Turkish, but that sounds interesting. Can you give an example of a similarity? I did have a quick look at the wikipedia entry on Turkish grammar... it doesn't look like knowing the standard European languages is any help in learning Turkish... did you find it a difficult language to learn?

 

[Anonymous]

I'd also be interested to see examples of similarites.

Turkish isn't an easy language to learn, by the way; impressive.

 

[Anonymous]

similarities

hello and thanks for your interest !

I'm afraid it is rather difficult to explain what I mean to someone that doesn't know turkish.
the logic behind the two languages seems the same to me. not only the syntax and the same way of using the verbs, also the whole construction of the sentences. it is very strange that latin, as the "mother" of so many european languages, has a totally different syntax than the modern tongues, but is similar to turkish, that belongs to the altaic language family. I will try to show what I am talking about:

e.g.:

gelmek - to come ("mek" ist the stem)

gel-iyor-um - I come
gel-iyor-sun - you come
gel-iyor - he/she/it comes
gel-iyor-uz - we come
gel-iyor-sunuz - you come
gel-iyor-lar - they come

"iyor" stands for present tense

everything you can possibly do to a verb is added at the end, there are no auxillary verbs or anything like it. for example:

gel-e-me-(y)-eceğ-im - I won't be able to come

gel(stem) + e(possibility) + me(negation) +eceğ(future) + im(1.person)

and that goes on and on, all the tenses,conditions,personal endings are added at the end.

more examples:

Istanbul'a / gittiğim / gün / yağmur / yağıyordu.
(it was raining the day I went to Istanbul.)

literally:
to Istanbul / me gone / day / rain / was raining


bunu al-a-maz-dı-m
(I couldn't have taken it.)

literally:
that take-possibility-negation-past tense-personal ending.

I would discribe latin as a quite "concentrated" language and turkish is just the same. also the use of so many genitives and gerunds. what we would express with a contact clause is expressed with those two grammatical forms in turkish. and the old SOP rule in latin works perfect for turkish,too.

even the personal endings and the cases are the same. although the five years of latin at school were a nightmare for me, it helped me a lot with turkish. while all the other students had to get used to the completely different syntax and way of thinking in turkish, I kind of knew it already from latin. locative? ablative? gerunde? piece of cake !
my latin teacher would certainly start to cry if he ever read this !!!
of course latin is much more complicated than turkish. Thank god there are no articles and genders of the words!

but still, it is strange that obviously no one ever noticed this before. maybe this similaritie only appears to me. anyway, it helped!


greetings from turkey

zippy

 

[Anonymous]

difficult or not

sorry, I didn't answer your question.

in a way turkish is really easy to learn, once you got used to it. it is extremly logical. you never come to the point at which you have to ask your teacher to repeat a lesson. but it is very hard for an european head to transfer the gramatic into spoken words, it simlpy takes too long to figure out the sentence (I think that is very similar to latin also).
by the way, another interesting thing about turkish:
acording to a japanese student in my class it is also very similar to japanese ! my turkish teacher confirmed that ("that's what all my japanese students say")
how about that one ?!?! even more strange. how can those two languages possibly have anything in common?! of course I have no idea about japanese, but just have a look at the way its written....
mysterious!

 

[Iynx]

I have seen (in my limited excursions into the internet world) English abbreviations of the form IMNAL = "I am not a lawyer". I will start this response with IMNATS-- I am not a Turkish speaker. But:

Links between the Indo-European and Altaic languages (and indeed still wider links) have been proposed before-- as for example in the hypothetical Nostratic beloved of Russian philologists. But such links are acknowleged, even by the proponents of such theories, to be tenuous at best.

I do not say (in other words) that you are not right. I do say that linguists in our time do not in general see the similarites between the two groups as indicating any close phylogenetic relationship.

The modification of words by altering their endings that you see as a similarity is in fact more conventionally viewed as representing an area of fundamental distinction between the two groups. The Turkish pattern of piling up suffixes (which you describe) is called "agglutinative", while the Indo-European pattern, more familiar to most of us here, is seen as "inflexional". The difference is said to be that while an Indo-European tongue will mark multiple ideas with a single suffix, the Altaic tongues use a string of suffixes, each separately conveying meaning. I see, of course, some fuzziness in this distinction. But that is the way that the matter is conventionally seen.

Other differences which are often seen as important include:

1. The absence of gender.
2. Use of singular nomina with numerals beyond one.
3. A (primitive) absence of clause-subordination.
4. The peculiar Altaic feature called "vowel harmony".

 

[Anonymous]

thanks

thanks for your explanations.

I still think that modern turkish in its appearance seems closer to latin than many other languages, even if the grammatical evolution may be totally different.
maybe I could compare it to bats and sparrows. if I knew nothing about these animals, I'd surely think the are close relatives. well, at least closer than penguins and sparrows!

but anyhow, the "similarity" helped me a lot with turkish.

and a cofession at the end: I actually DİD find something about it on the internet! a guy called polat kaya "proves" my question.
if you have a look at it, you will soon understand why I didn't mention it. the whole turkish internet community is laughing at him.
so, thanks again and follow the links if you need something to cheer you up!

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/b_c_n_2003/message/313
http://www.compmore.net/~tntr/cide.html


greetings
zippy

 

[Anonymous]

As a fluent Turkish speaker, your examples made a lot of sense, Zippy.
I concur that there are some similarities evident between the two languages.

That was a very interesting read. Thank you for the sharing the links also.

 

[Gregorius]

How does modern Turkish compare with ancient Turkish? It's possible that the similarities arise from the fact that many languages in ancient times had very inflexional/agglutinative (synthetic) systems that evolved over time into more analytic (i.e. based on word order and prepositions) systems. One need not limit his/her examination to Latin and Romance, either. English, which is now one of the most analytic languages in western Europe, once had a more regular and pervasive declension system akin to that of Latin. In German, the declension of the articles and a few remnant masculine nouns with distinct oblique forms also hint at a more elaborate inflexional system that eroded with time. It's possible that historical circumstances allowed Turkish, like Romanian to some degree, to retain its inflexions longer than most of the Indo-European family.

 

[Imber Ranae]

How does modern Turkish compare with ancient Turkish? It's possible that the similarities arise from the fact that many languages in ancient times had very inflexional/agglutinative (synthetic) systems that evolved over time into more analytic (i.e. based on word order and prepositions) systems.

Not really. Turkish has always been very agglutinative, and there's never been any linguistic impulse for it to become more analytical. The Indo-European languages, on the other hand, are principally fusional, not agglutinative. There's a big difference. Linguistic agglutination is the joining together of numerous morphemes, which remain distinct, to form words. It's all very regular.

Contrariwise, morphemes in fusional languages, particularly case endings in Latin, are often indistinct and layered in complex patterns, such that one morpheme may contain several semantic elements and may overlap with an identical morpheme which has partially or completely different semantic elements. To give an example, the case termination -ī in Latin may indicate (in 2nd decl.) genitive singular masculine, genitive singular neuter, nominative plural masculine, (in 2nd decl. with i before termination) vocative singular masculine, (in 3rd decl.) dative singular masculine, dative singular feminine, dative singular neuter, (in certain 3rd decl. i-stems) ablative singular masculine, ablative singular feminine, or ablative singular neuter.

These are all technically separate morphemes, which is why it's necessary to memorize declensional paradigms when learning Latin. None of that is necessary in an agglutinative language, where you can have one morpheme to mark number, another to mark case, and another to mark gender (if applicable, though Turkish does not have grammatical gender), etc., which are then combined to form the noun according to its case, number, gender, etc. One has only to remember one morpheme per semantic unit.

Of course the agglutinative-fusional distinction is a continuum rather than two absolute categories, which means primarily agglutinative languages will have some fusional characteristics and vice versa. But where Latin is principally fusional, Turkish is principally agglutinative. For this reason, together with the many other reasons articulated by Iynx, the two languages can not be said to be syntactically similar. No genetic relationship between the two is readily discernible, either.

 

[Quasus]

No genetic relationship between the two is readily discernible, either.

Both of them are nostratic, if it isn't a fiction.

 

[Imber Ranae]

Both of them are nostratic, if it isn't a fiction.

Like I said, not readily discernible. If someone ever proves the Nostratic hypothesis they'll be famous, indeed (well, as famous as a linguist can become).

 

[scrabulista]

Are there any Trojan War hypotheses out there?

 

[Imber Ranae]

Are there any Trojan War hypotheses out there?

Probably. The world abounds with cranks.