Talk:Turkish phonology

Comments

Thanks for creating this article. Atilim Gunes Baydin 22:18, 24 April 2007 (UTC)

Different phonemes, or allophones?

The section Turkish phonology describes /c/, /ɟ/ and /ɫ/ as separate phonemes next to /k/, /g/ and /l/ – at least that is the impression I get from reading the text and the use of the notation "/.../". Would it not to be better to describe [k] and [c] as complementary allophones of a single phoneme /k/, and so on?  --Lambiam 15:19, 4 December 2008 (UTC)

As the article states, they're in complementary distribution in native words but contrast in loanwords. So they're marginal phonemes, maybe but still differentiated. AlexanderKaras (talk) 22:46, 5 June 2010 (UTC)

I have put these sounds in parentheses, as they only contrast in loanwords. Jɑυмe (xarrades) 19:44, 10 December 2011 (UTC)

Phoneme consistency

The consonant chart uses kʲ, gʲ, while some examples use c, ɟ. For consistency's sake, I'm going to change the latter to the former. I don't think there's any reason for these to be inconsistent, but should the latter or the former be used? (Personally I prefer the former because it shows the relationship between the two k variants. ʙʌsʌwʌʟʌ ^{spik ʌp!} 10:28, 6 February 2011 (UTC)

Actually I'm going with the latter since WP:IPA for Turkish supports it. ʙʌsʌwʌʟʌ ^{spik ʌp!} 10:33, 6 February 2011 (UTC)

Either is fine, but you're right. We should be consistent. — Ƶ§œš¹ _{[aɪm ˈfɹ̠ˤʷɛ̃ɾ̃ˡi]} 15:54, 6 February 2011 (UTC)

Velarization

According to the article,

"Some Arabic loanwords pronounced with a velarized /tˠ/ in Turkish[citation needed] do not conform to vowel harmony either. For example saat-e ('to the clock/hour'), seyahat-e ('to the trip'), istirahat-e ('to rest')."

I'm skeptical about this. These words in Arabic have plain /t/; they are not velarized. Why would they be in Turkish? Unless I see a source, I might go ahead and delete it. Thoughts? AlexanderKaras (talk) 20:12, 22 February 2011 (UTC)

I was the one who wrote "velarization" and was not sure of it myself, feel free to correct it. As mentioned in the text, some Arabic-origin words ending in -t that do not conform to vowel harmony in Turkish are: saat (ساعة), seyahat (سياحة), istirahat (إستراحة), hakikat (حقيقة) (you can confirm this with the Turkish Language Institute dictionary, for example [1]). Some other Arabic-origin words ending in -t that do conform to vowel harmony are hattat (خطّاط), sakat (سقط), vasat (وسط). Arabic words ending with -d have been imported with a -t into Turkish and they also conform to vowel harmony, such as fesat (فساد), cellat (جلّاد), hasat (حصد). It appears from the Nisanyan etymological dictionary that most Arabic words that do not obey the vowel harmony words end with ة, (Tāʾ marbūṭa). There are exceptions though, such as hayat (حياة) and rahat (راحة), I am not sure why. Words ending with the Arabic letter ط (Ṭāʾ) appear to be imported as a normal T sound in Turkish. These are my observations, I cannot provide a source that explains all this, although there are Turkish texts that mention that foreign words that tend to be pronounced with a "light" T are followed by a front vowel (for example here, at the end of the section titled "Büyük Ünlü Uyumunun Özel Durumları"). I am not a linguist, so if you could use this information appropriately to improve the text, it will be great! --İnfoCan (talk) 18:08, 28 February 2011 (UTC)

/tˠ/ is palatalized, not velarized. And if there are two different pronunciations of the letter ‹t›, this should be mentioned (with sources) first in the section on Consonants. CapnPrep (talk) 22:39, 28 February 2011 (UTC)

In Arabic, emphatic /tˠ/ is velarized/pharyngealized, not palatalized. — Ƶ§œš¹ _{[aɪm ˈfɹ̠ˤʷɛ̃ɾ̃ˡi]} 23:28, 28 February 2011 (UTC)

I guess you mean ط‎ /tˤ/, but as İnfoCan said, this one gives rise to a normal /t/ in Turkish, with no effect on VH. The question is whether the Turkish ‹t› (corresponding to ة) that triggers front vowel harmony should be analyzed as palatalized /tˠ/. As ʙʌsʌwʌʟʌ says below, this does not appear to be phonetically motivated. CapnPrep (talk) 00:16, 1 March 2011 (UTC)

I don't think there are two different pronunciations of <t> in Turkish. Also, it seems that the palatalized /tˠ/ in Arabic, when borrowed into Turkish actually follows VH, while the plain dental/alveolar /t/ sometimes doesn't. We need some good sources on this. Does Geoffrey Lewis say anything on this? ʙʌsʌwʌʟʌ ^{spik ʌp!} 22:56, 28 February 2011 (UTC)

Harf-e ?

Continuing with the topic of vowel harmony, of the Arabic-origin Turkish words harf (حرف), zarf (ظرف) and sarf (صرف), the first one does not conform to vowel harmony (harf-e, 'to the letter'), while the other two do (zarf-a, 'to the envelope', sarf-a, 'to the expenditure'). It would be good if an explanation could be found for this usage. --İnfoCan (talk) 19:18, 28 February 2011 (UTC)

Sezer stress

Proper names (of both places and foreign people) follow a different stress pattern, known in the linguistics literature as Sezer stress (after the discoverer of the pattern, Engin Sezer). In this lexical domain, stress occurs on the antepenult if the penult is light and the antepenult is heavy, and otherwise on the penult. The weight of the final syllable is irrelevant.

Okay, cool. Newbie crit coming. a) Do Turkish names not follow Sezer stress? i.e. are they always word-final? b) Now I've unravelled - I think - the description, wouldn't it be clearer to split the rule description into two halves: first, that two-syllable words have word-initial stress; second, that three-syllable words obey the rule specified. Afraid I can't come up with a more elegant way of stating that rule.

I'm asking because Wikipedia is pretty high up in Google rankings for 'Sezer stress' and so it's more productive for me to ask the questions here than to delve into lit for a language I'm not familiar with. 87.194.30.190 (talk) 20:16, 10 July 2011 (UTC)

9th vowel?

There's a discussion here among Turkish speakers as to whether there is significant allophony for /e/, [e̞] and [æ]. Some argue it sounds nothing like English /æ/ (that the distinction is more like [e] [ɛ]), others that it does. Also that there are lexicalized exceptions in Istanbul which would make it incipiently phonemic. Came up because an editor wanted to add it to the Turkish IPA key, but it should really be worked out here first.

Last post:

There is general rule for when and how to pronunce each e. Most e's are closed apart from the rule below:

In the same syllable, if the e is follwed by: r, l, m or n. The "e" is open.

Ex: Sen, the "e" is followed by "n", therefore pronunced: sæn.

Let's make it accusative:

Seni, the syllables are: Se-ni, the "e" is not follwed by an "n" in the same syllable. Thus: closed.

There are a few exceptions of course. For instance the word "renk" is pronunced with a closed e, although it is followed by an "n".

The editor bringing this to my attention,[2] User:Amateur55, says,

The mentioned exceptions only exist in the standard Istanbul dialect. For instance, in my northern dialect, I pronounce kendi, elli, renk with a /æ/ sound, while they are all exceptions to the described general rules in Istanbul dialect.

Certainly s.t. we should take into account if we can justify it. And, does the same thing happen w other mid vowels? — kwami (talk) 09:03, 13 August 2011 (UTC)

First, I never noticed something similar with the other mid-vowels.

Second, there's definitely a /æ/ vowel in Turkish. The users in the given page use /e/ and /ɛ/ for the closed e sound, which is represented by /e̞/ in the current Turkish vowel chart. The correct IPA representation of that sound is the one here, not there. — amateur (talk) 11:20, 13 August 2011 (UTC)

But how do we know, when one says it's the English 'a' sound, and another says it's nothing like that sound? — kwami (talk) 20:23, 13 August 2011 (UTC)

Well, we know that the closed e sound is /e̞/ and not /e/ or /ɛ/, this is confirmed by our references in the article.

For the open e sound, one user in the given page claims that sound does not exist at all, seven others and me assert that it exists and is /æ/. No one says that it's /ɛ/. If that's not enough, then we have to find a RS or determine the sound by listening.

Besides, in addition to the given rules above, the "-mez" suffix has an open e. — amateur (talk) 15:53, 14 August 2011 (UTC)

maxguncel and macrotis say there's only one /e/ sound. Seraphim says there are two, but that the open one is [ɛ] and that [æ] sounds "very rude" to Turkish ears. Says they're like French é and ê. Eline0909 and Rallino agree there are two sounds but don't specify what they are. Only Black4blue says he agrees with you that it's [æ]. So that's two votes for [æ], not seven; one vote for [ɛ]; two for an undisclosed distinction; and two for no distinction. Not that such things should be decided by a vote: Reality is not a democracy. Still, it's hardly a sweeping endorsement for [æ]. — kwami (talk) 23:42, 14 August 2011 (UTC)

The Redhouse grammar of Ottoman Turkish (1884) counts 11 short (phonetic) vowels and 8 long, but these are not phonemes. Since the Redhouse analysis predates the Latin alphabet for Turkish, it's an interesting piece of evidence. I wonder whether (a) the phonetic analysis is still valid for modern Turkish; (b) how the phonetic analysis corresponds to the phonemic analysis; (c) how it might be influenced/biased/distorted by the Ottoman writing system and the English phonetic system. --Macrakis (talk) 01:37, 15 August 2011 (UTC)

Dale Chock posted a link to a ref on my talk page: Göksel and Kerslake, Turkish: a comprehensive grammar, 2005, p. 10. "All" vowels but /o a/ have lowered allophones word-finally: [ɪ ʏ ɛ œ ʊ] (they don't give an example for /ɯ/). ([e ø o], BTW, are close mid, not mid.) In addition, /e/ is [æ] before coda /m n l r/ with some lexical exceptions for some people. Just what amateur said above. There was another ref, Balpinar, Turkish phonology, morphology, and syntax, pp. 38–39,[3] which had something very different: /i u/ are [i u] before ğ, [ɪ ʊ] elsewhere. /e/ is something like [ej] before ğ, [ɛ] elsewhere. Some speakers have [æ] in "certain environments", such as in genç, mendil, Mehmet. /a/ is [ə] in the first syllable and [ʌ] elsewhere. Some speakers have [a], but that is much less common. — kwami (talk) 09:18, 17 August 2011 (UTC)

Don't Celia Kerslake and Aslı Göksel say that 〈a〉 is /ɑ/, not /ɐ/? Then that /ɑ/ has allophones in certain environments.

Sound of Ğ (Soft g)

It seems like there is a debate on whether this phoneme has a sound or not. While many sources claim that it has no sound an used only for determining the vowel length, I think it does have a sound, but not a velar approximant [ɰ] as it is said in the article. I think it's a sound articulated far back in the mouth, something like a uvular approximant [ʁ̞]. Since it's a very slight sound, it might be realized as having no sound, but I think it does. I'm not a linguist or anything, but I (at least) know that the sound is not articulated anywhere near the velum. — amateur (talk) 20:43, 30 August 2011 (UTC)

Turkish terminal "-r" sounding like "-rzh" or "-rsh"

[I am copying the following from Wikipedia:Reference_desk as it is relevant to this article and may inspire further development. --İnfoCan (talk) 22:09, 7 May 2012 (UTC) ]

Some Turkish speakers tend to pronounce words ending with "-r" like "-rzh" or "-rsh". Not everyone does it, and it seems to occur mainly when the word ending with "-r" is the last word of a sentence, while you hear a clear "r" sound if another word follows it.

You can hear examples of this on this YouTube video:

At :03 seconds the speaker pronounces kelimeler as "kelimelerzh", and at :40 seconds pronounces onlar as "onlarzh" or "onlarsh".

Here is another example from a YouTube video I found mentioned in a forum site :

at :11 seconds, and again at :59, the speaker pronounces hayir as "hayirzh". A at 4:31 she reads three phrases in which she pronounces bir as "birzh"- then repeats the phrases pronouncing it "bir".

I couldn't find anything on this phenomenon other than inquires of it by learners of Turkish, and curiously most Turks are not aware of it, some even deny it strongly. Is there any formal description of this? To make the question more generic, how would you describe/label this kind of R sound? Has such a phenomenon been observed in other languages? --İnfoCan (talk) 16:20, 3 May 2012 (UTC)

I don't have an answer, but t's also discussed briefly at the alveolar trill's talk page: Talk:Alveolar_trill#The_Turkish_Final_.22r.22 (though the sound is an alveolar flap, not trill, according to our article on Turkish phonology). ---Sluzzelin talk 17:25, 3 May 2012 (UTC)

"R" has interchanged with a fricative at various times and places. In West Slavonic, before a front vowel, /r/ became a fricativised trill in Czech (written '"ř") and a fricative /ʒ/ in Polish (written "rz"). On the other hand, in North Germanic, final "-r" results from an original "-s", apparently via "-z". --ColinFine (talk) 17:36, 3 May 2012 (UTC)

My assumption when I met a Turkish speaker was that it was tied in with word-final consonant devoicing, where word-final b d g v z become p t k f s. r seems to have been classified more like z than like l or n, so it devoices as well. In the process, it also becomes more sh-like, likely because a devoiced r is harder

to produce than a normal r. Our page on Turkish phonology seems to confirm this. Lsfreak (talk) 18:13, 3 May 2012 (UTC)

Why /c/ and not /k/

Why is it that in the Turkish language article the pronunciation of Türkçe is [tyrcˈtʃe] and not [tyrkˈtʃe]. Which rule states that? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 109.245.68.133‎ (talk • contribs)

We may have to ask User:Amateur55, who changed the k to a c back in December. — Ƶ§œš¹ _{[ãːɱ ˈfɹ̠ˤʷɪ̃ə̃nlɪ]} 20:22, 9 June 2012 (UTC)

It is explained in the article:

In native Turkic words, the velar consonants /k, ɡ/ are palatalized to [c, ɟ] (similar to Russian) when adjacent to the front vowels /e, i, œ, y/. Similarly, the consonant /l/ is realized as a clear or light [l] next to front vowels (including word finally), and as a velarized [ɫ] (dark l) next to the central and back vowels /a, ɯ, o, u/. These alternations are not indicated orthographically: the same letters ⟨k⟩, ⟨g⟩, and ⟨l⟩ are used for both pronunciations. amateur (talk) 19:16, 22 December 2012 (UTC)

düğün (wedding)

Before editing (and probably enhancing) the article, I have a question. Is the pronunciation of düğün really ['dü:jün] or do some Turkish dialects have the ğ all silent (['dü:n])? To me the latter would be dubious, especially in respect to frequent misunderstandings likely to be expected in fast speech. dün = "yesterday" !! Hence, düğün ought to be one of the few "ğ-words" which apparently do not have an alternative pronunciation. (unlike soğuk (either ['so:uk] or (more rarely, but used) ['so:ωuk]) -andy 77.190.18.144 (talk) 00:41, 5 July 2013 (UTC)