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Turkish uses different sentence and work construction than English. Even with a reasonable vocabulary I have found it difficult to read a newspaper or almost any other article and understand the context. The classic book by Geoffrey Lewis on grammar was useful, but I found it irritating to have such ponderous examples, some of which I had trouble even reading the English. Everything necessary to know seemed to be there, but it was poorly organized and somehow archaic. His literal translations were particularly artificial. Do not be mislead, this book by Asli Göksel and Celia Kerslake is truly ponderous. The academic approach to grammar can be overwhelming. I jumped into the book halfway through to where I felt I needed the most help and had to stop and go back to the beginning to become familiar with the authors' approach and terminology. It is not enjoyable reading by any means. But I think the book is a necessary addition for a complete understanding of Turkish. The hundreds of examples are well chosen with a typical spoken English translation. It is seldom necessary to look up a word while reading an example. The examples are often engaging, requiring a bit of thought to see how the English and Turkish relate. Many examples also indicate the suffixes, which helps overcome a huge stumbling block because of the multiple uses many have. I would definitely recommend the book, but expect to spend many days working through it for the first time, and then again. It is not your drag along phrase book, or one you should buy a couple weeks before your vacation to Turkey.
E-Book Content
TURKISH: A COMPREHENSIVE GRAMMAR Routledge Comprehensive Grammars Comprehensive Grammars are available for the following languages: Modern Written Arabic Cantonese Catalan Chinese Danish Dutch Greek Indonesian Japanese Slovene Swedish Turkish Ukrainian Modern Welsh Titles of related interest Colloquial Turkish: A Complete Course for Beginners Jeroen Aarssen and Ad Backus Dictionary of the Turkic Languages Kurtuluş Öztopçu, Zhoumagaly Abuov, Nasir Kambarov and Youssef Azemoun TURKISH: A COMPREHENSIVE GRAMMAR Aslı Göksel and Celia Kerslake LONDON AND NEW YORK First published 2005 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 270 Madison Ave, New York, NY 10016 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2006. “To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to http://www.ebookstore.tandf.co.uk/.” © 2005 Aslı Göksel and Celia Kerslake All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data has been applied for ISBN 0-203-34076-0 Master e-book ISBN ISBN 0-415-11494-2 (pbk) ISBN 0-415-21761-X (hbk) CONTENTS Acknowledgements vii Introduction viii Abbreviations xvii List of conventions observed in this book The Turkish alphabet and writing conventions Part 1 Phonology: the sound system 1 Phonological units xx xxii 1 3 2 Sound changes produced in the stem by suffixation 14 3 Vowel harmony 21 4 Word stress 26 5 Intonation and sentence stress 35 Part 2 Morphology: the s