Turkish alfabet and the vowel harmony rule (in brief)

TURKISH ALFABET AND THE VOWEL HARMONY RULE


he Turkish alphabet as it is known today was introduced in 1928 by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk after an extensive reform of the Turkish language.

He introduced the Latin alphabet which replaced the previous one based on Arabic scripts, very similar to the Persian alphabet.

The actual Turkish alphabet is composed of 21 consonants and 8 vowels. Much of the consonants have the same value as in English while the vowels have pretty much the same value as in Italian or French

While Turkish alphabet do not include letters like Q, W and X which are replaced by equivalent phonetic sounds like  K, V and KS, there are six additional letters Ç  Ğ  ı Ş Ö  Ü   as well as  other letters  existing in English but having a different pronunciation.

The letters composing the alphabet are the following:

A B C Ç D E F G Ğ H I İ J K L M N O Ö P R S Ş T Ü V Y Z

a b c ç d e f g ğ h ı i j k l m n o ö p r s ş t u ü v y z

Consonants are divided into voiceless and voiced as in the following chart:

Voiceless:  p t k s ş ç f h

Voiced:     b d g z j c v l m n r y ( ğ )

Sounds for consonants are different from English:

B: BE as in bend

C: GE as in gentle

Ç:     CE as in chest

D: DE as in demonstration

F: FE as in ferry

G: GE as gale

H: HE as in hence

J: GI as in gist

K: KE as in kettle

L: LE as in Leicester

M: ME as in melt

N: NE as in neighbor

P: PE as in petrol

R: RE as in rest

S: SE as in sector

Ş:     SCE as in shepard

T: TE as in tent

V: VE as in velvet

Y: YE as in yellow

Z: ZE as in zebra

Vowels sound are the following

A:  as in American

E:  as in elbow

I:  as in India

O:  as in oil

Ö:  as the French sound  in öeil (eye)

U:  as in union

Ü:     as the French sound in unité

 VOWEL HARMONY

Turkish language is an armonic and melodious idiom due to the vowel harmony whereby words beginning with front or back vowel preserve the same features.

This language is spoken by nearly 200 million people if we consider that the Turkic family includes idioms spoken from China (Uygur) through Central Asia, Urals until the Balkans.

Turkish has no gender, verbs are all regular and adjectives are obtained from nouns and verbs are built from adjectives and nouns.

Every word reads as it is written.

The principle of vowel harmony sets the fundamental principle of the entire grammar structure.

In other words if the first syllable of a term is a front vowel, the subsequent syllable has to be a front vowel and viceversa if the the first syllable is a back vowel so will be the subsequent syllable.

The following chart will help understand this rule

TERM ENDING BY VOWEL/CONSONANT

	DOMINANT VOWEL	GENERAL SUFFIXES AND ACCUSATIVE		DATIVE	PLURAL
FRONT VOWELS	E   İ Ö   Ü	İ Ü		E  E	LER LER
BACK VOWELS	A   I O   U	I U	A     A		LAR LAR