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The phonology of the Turkish language describes the set of sounds and their relationships with one another in spoken Turkish. One characteristic feature of Turkish is a system of vowel harmony that distinguishes between front and back vowels. The majority of words in Turkish adhere to a system of only having one of the two groups. Consonants are also affected, with palatal stops being present with front vowels and velar stops existing with back ones. Further details are given below.
[edit] Consonants
The phoneme /ɣ/ is softer than a velar fricative (that is, a sound articulated from the velum as /k, g/ with the frication of /f, v, s, ʃ, z/) and nearer to velar approximant (/ɰ/, an unrounded /w/) or palatal approximant (/j/ as in y in yard).[1] It only occurs between front vowels, and appears in Turkish orthography as the letter usually referred to as yumuşak g ("soft g"), written as ğ. The yumuşak g never occurs at the beginning of a word, but always follows a vowel and is syllable-final. Between two back vowels it is silent; when word-final or preceding another consonant, it lengthens the preceding vowel. In native Turkic words, the sounds /k, ɡ, ɫ/ are palatalized (as in Russian) when adjacent to the front vowels /e, i, œ, y/ and as velar consonants when adjacent to the central and back vowels /a, ɯ, o, u/. In foreign borrowings and proper nouns, however, they are contrastive. These phones are not distinguished in the orthography, in which both sets are written k, g and l.[2] Words and morphemes ending in /b, d, dʒ, ɡ/ are devoiced to [p, t, tʃ, k] word-finally and before a consonant: /edmeɡ/ 'to do, to make' is pronounced [etmek]. (This is reflected in the orthography, so that it is spelled etmek.) When a vowel is added to nouns ending with postvocalic /ɡ/, it is lenited to ğ [ɣ]; this is also reflected in the orthography.[3] [edit] Vowels
The vowels of the Turkish language are, in their alphabetical order, a, e, ı, i, o, ö, u, ü.[4] There are no diphthongs in Turkish and when two vowels come together, which occurs rarely and only with loanwords or old Ottoman words, each vowel retains its individual sound.
(/ø/ is transcribed /œ/ in the vowel chart at right, but has the same mid height as /e/ and /o/.) Although a central vowel phonetically, /a/ is phonologically a 'back' vowel based on its patterning with other back vowels in harmonic processess and the alternation of adjacent consonants (see above). The vowel /e/ plays the role as the front' analog of /a/. [edit] Vowel harmony
With some exceptions, a native Turkish word incorporates either exclusively back vowels (a, ı, o, u) or exclusively front vowels (e, i, ö, ü), as, for example, in the words karanlıktadırlar ("they were in the dark") and düşünceliliklerinden ("due to their thoughtfulness"). The Turkish vowel system can be considered as being three-dimensional, where vowels are characterised by three features: front/back, rounded/unrounded, and high/low, resulting in eight possible combinations, each corresponding to one Turkish vowel, as shown in the table. Vowel harmony of grammatical suffixes is realized through "a chameleon-like quality"[5], meaning that the vowels of suffixes change to harmonize with the vowel of the preceding syllable. According to the changeable vowel, there are two patterns:
The vowel ö does not occur in grammatical suffixes. In the isolated case of o in the verbal progressive suffix -i4yor it is immutable, breaking the vowel harmony such as in yürüyor ("he/she/it is walking"). Some examples illustrating the use of vowel harmony in Turkish with the copula -dir4 ("[he/she/it] is") are Türkiyedir ("it is Turkey"), gündür ("it is the day"), kapıdır ("it is the door"), and paltodur ("it is the coat"). Compound words do not undergo vowel harmony in their constituent words as in bugün ("today" from bu "this" and gün "day") and başkent ("capital" from baş "head" and kent "city"). Vowel harmony does not apply for loanwords and some invariant and irregular suffixes, such as -ki ("belonging to ...") and -ken ("while ...-ing"). In the suffix -e2bil ("may", "can"), only the first vowel undergoes vowel harmony. There are a few native Turkish words that do not have vowel harmony such as anne ("mother"). In such words, suffixes harmonize with the final vowel as in annedir ("she is a mother"). [edit] Soft L
Many loanwords end in a "clear" /l/ instead of a "dark" /ɫ/, even when the preceding vowel is a back vowel. This group includes all words borrowed from Arabic or French that end in -l when written. In such words, the vowel of a following mutable suffix is always a front vowel, regardless of the type of vowel of the preceding syllable.[7] The table on the right gives some examples. Some Arabic loanwords pronounced with a velarized t in Turkish do not conform to vowel harmony either. For example saat-e ("to the clock/hour"), seyahat-e ("to the trip"), istirahat-e ("to rest"). [edit] StressMain stress occurs regularly on the last syllable of a word.[1] Exceptions include forms with some suffixes which have inherent stress, and a set of words with the Sezer stress pattern consisting primarily of loanwords (particularly from Italian and Greek) such as masa /ˈmasa/ "desk", lokanta /loˈkanta/ "restaurant", and iskele /isˈkele/ "pier". The lexical exceptions in Turkish stress have been important to linguistic theories of how phonological exceptions should be represented grammatically. [edit] Regular final stressAs stated above, word-final stress is the regular pattern in Turkish:
The metrical weight of a syllable in terms of moras has no effect on the placement of stress in the regular pattern. Light (L) syllables in Turkish are open syllables (V or CV) which consist of a single mora while heavy (H) syllables have consonantal codas (VC or CVC) and consist of two moras.
The regular pattern persists in derived words as well. (See: stress and suffixation section.) [edit] Sezer stressProper 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 penultimate syllables unless the penultimate syllable is light and the antepenultimate syllable is heavy. The weight of the final syllable is irrelevant. Penultimate:
Antepenultimate in …HLσ words:
The Sezer stressed form /aˈda.na/ would be expected to have the unattested form */a.daˈna/ under the regular stress pattern. Thus, it can be seen that the regular and the Sezer pattern are contrastive. The Sezer stress pattern is productive in spite of it being observed on a smaller set of lexical items. Suffixed words that have the regular pattern can shift to the lexical class of placenames (via zero-derivation). When these words are used as placenames, the regular stress pattern shifts to the Sezer pattern. For instance, the word /toɾ.baˈlɯ/ torbalı "with bag" has regular stress in its normal use, but when a placename it has Sezer stress /ˈtoɾ.ba.lɯ/. A further note about Sezer stress is that the pattern is completely regular. This is true of loanwords whose correspondent in the source language has a different stress pattern. Thus, it is not the case that rhythms from the source language are being transferred into Turkish. For example, the English word Arkansas has antepenultimate stress (i.e. /ˈɑr.kən.sɔː/), but the loanword in Turkish has penultimate stress as predicted by the Sezer rhythm. One approach to the metrical analysis of the Sezer pattern posits a general disyllabic iambic rhythm that is aligned with the right word edge with a restriction against having a nonfinal foot (or alternately requiring an extrametrical final syllable) and a requirement that heavy syllables carry stress (weight-to-stress). Thus:
The words with antepenultimate stress have a rhythmic reversal to a trochee to prevent a heavy antepenultimate syllable from not being stressed, that is an illicit *(H'L)σ form:
[edit] Stress and suffixationThe regular stress pattern occurs on words with a stem combined with suffixes. Here the stress is consistently word-final and appears to shift rightward away from the stem as suffixes are concatenated.
The above is not the case in stems with Sezer stress. Stems with Sezer stress retain the main stress of the underived form:
(Turkish orthography requires an apostrophe between proper nouns and attached suffixes.) Adverbs do not generally take final stress:
Words ending with a personal predicative suffix are generally stressed on the preceding syllable. This stress pattern can be useful in disambiguating homographic words containing possessive suffixes or the plural suffix:[8]
Other suffixes which do not take stress are the interrogative and negative suffixes mi and ma, and the adverbial and adjectival suffixes le and ce:
On the other hand, the verbal tense/aspect/mood morpheme is usually stressed:
[edit] Stress in compoundsIn compounds, the first compound element retains its stress (prior to compounding) while the second element loses its stress. [edit] Lexical exceptions
Diminutives. Word-initial trochee (= initial stress). -en/-an adverbs. Nonfinal right-aligned trochee weight-to-stress (i.e. stress H penult, else: stress antepenult):
[edit] Secondary stressSecondary stress in Turkish has been reported with conflicting descriptions. Some linguists have denied its existence while others have observed it but with different researchers describing incompatible stress placement systems. One description has secondary stress on closed syllables; another has secondary stress on final syllables in words with nonfinal main stress. Further research is clearly warranted. [edit] See also[edit] References and notes
[edit] Bibliography
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