Anybody into linguistics?

[SoyElTurco]

Wikipedia is really helpful with this topic.

Some linguistic info about Turkish:

It's agglutinative - meaning it suffixes like crazy. You could have a thirty or forty or infinite letter word that is in fact a sentence and a word.
For example the sentence-word " Çekoslovakyalılaştırabildiklerimizden misiniz? " means "Are you one of those people whom we made resemble the people from Czechoslovakia?"

Agglutination is a key characterisitic of Uralic and Altaic languages. Japanese and Korean too, some linguists consider them to be Altaic languages (Turkish is also Altaic) but are not as agglutinative as the Turkic languages are.

Finnish, Estonian and Hungarian are Uralic languages that agglutinate like the Altaic languages.

[jgk3]

Re: Anybody into linguistics?

I'm not.

[jgk3]

Re: Anybody into linguistics?

Turkish is also a highly inflected language, like Armenian. This means that they like to use morphologically bound bits onto verbs to determine 1st, 2nd 3rd person, plural or singular. Agglutination just extends this principle of compounding words together to anything that can provide more details about the sentence's event.

Sheds light on different schemes for language humans are able to use.

[Anonymouse]

Re: Anybody into linguistics?

From what I know, agglutination is also very common to Armenian, unless I'm confusing things here. Also, Armenian is one of the most phonetically precise languages.

[jgk3]

Re: Anybody into linguistics?

Also, Armenian is one of the most phonetically precise languages.

very true.

And for your other claim, alright Anon, show us funny examples of highly agglutinated Armenian words. I know I find many of them whenever I read the Armenian-English Dictionary.

[SoyElTurco]

Re: Anybody into linguistics?

From what I know, agglutination is also very common to Armenian, unless I'm confusing things here. Also, Armenian is one of the most phonetically precise languages.

what do you mean by "phonetically precise?" does that mean many of the sounds are reproduced more standardly by everyone?

[jgk3]

Re: Anybody into linguistics?

what do you mean by "phonetically precise?" does that mean many of the sounds are reproduced more standardly by everyone?

no, it means the written language matches the spoken language. Turkish is famous for being extremely accurate in this way too.

English and French on the other hand are horrible at this, as you might've noticed.

In French, the world eau (water) is pronounced o, lol.

In English, Knight is pronounced nayt.

Why are they so screwed up? Evolution of the standard language. Did you know that Knight used to be pronounced "K@-ni-g@t"/Kuh-ni-guht (for Turks, Armenians use the @ sound to refer to your dotless i sound). Eventually, Standard English became allergic to adjacent K and n, and g and t, so through responsive phonotactics (tactics of overcoming these allergies), it developed a homonym for night/nite.

In the case of French, eau is, believe it or not, related to Latin aqua. French is notorious for its apocope, meaning loss of final sounds in words, so eventually, it deleted all the vowel sounds it transformed from aqua which find themselves orthographically surviving in "eau", and just kept an o sound.

Turks have an easy time pronouncing their words phonetically as they are written in orthography because their orthography is so recent (less than 100 years ago, they adopted the Latin Alphabet. Groups that adopted their current alphabetic system relatively recently tend to have a consistency between the phonetics and the orthography of their language).

Armenian orthography matches our speech for other reasons, namely the fact that most Western Armenians today live in the diaspora and are likely more influenced by Standard Modern Western Armenian, which is taught in schools than they are by the village Armenian of their ancestors. I think the same could be said about Eastern Armenians living in the diaspora. But my guess from what I've heard is that in Armenia, since it is an Armenian country, you will find regionalisms (not to be confused with borrowings) thriving more often (as Sero discussed Lennakantsi vs. Yerevantsi), and overtime, this would mean that the consistency of Armenian spoken in Armenia will gradually weaken. The only thing that blocks this natural trend, or at least slows it down, is state education of Standard Armenian and how well the State manages to make this standard variety the primary dialect of its citizens.

In Italy for example, this has come a long way. When Italy was first unified, less than 2% of its inhabitants spoke the "standard" Italian dialect as their first language. Today, 60% of Italians living in Italy claim it as their first language. The 40% speaking the dialect of their Paese still constitute a huge population of, dare I say, deviants, but the centralized Italian language has gained monumental grounds against them.

[Palavra]

Re: Anybody into linguistics?

Armenian mode on:

Jgk3, are you a turk? why do you know turkish langauge so much? spy! hidden turk who is treating like an armenian.

Armenian mode off.


Realy how do you know it? By the way, French sucks.

[SoyElTurco]

Re: Anybody into linguistics?

same for spanish and the azeris adopted IPA.

[jgk3]

Re: Anybody into linguistics?

Armenian mode on:

Jgk3, are you a turk? why do you know turkish langauge so much? spy! hidden turk who is treating like an armenian.

Armenian mode off.


Realy how do you know it? By the way, French sucks.

Linguists are international spies. Beware. I'm off to spy on Mohawks now, but watch your back.