Turkish vocabulary


This article is a companion to Turkish grammar and contains some information that might be considered grammatical.[] The purpose of this article is mainly to show the use of some of the yapım ekleri "structural suffixes" of the Turkish language, as well as to give some of the structurally important words, like pronouns, determiners, postpositions, and conjunctions.

Origins

See also Turkish language#Vocabulary.
In the ninth century, Turks began to convert to Islam and to use the Arabic alphabet. When the Seljuk Turks overran Iran, they adopted for official and literary use the Persian language—which meanwhile had borrowed many Armenian and Arabic words. Thus educated Turks had available for their use the vocabularies of three languages: Turkish, Arabic, and Persian.
When the Ottoman Empire arose out of the remains of the Selcuk Empire in Anatolia, its official language, Osmanlıca or Ottoman Turkish, became the only language to approach English in the size of its vocabulary. However, common people continued to use kaba Türkçe or "rough Turkish" which contained much fewer loanwords and which is the basis of the modern Turkish language.
With the advent of the Turkish Republic in 1923 came the attempt to unify the languages of the people and the administration, and to westernize the country. The modern Turkish alphabet, based on the Latin script, was introduced. Also, Arabic and Persian words were replaced, as possible, by:
Turkish words surviving in speech, obsolete Turkish words, new words formed regularly from the agglutinative resources of Turkish, thoroughly new words or formations. However, still a large portion of current Turkish words have Arabic or Persian origins.
Turkish has words borrowed from Greek due to the Ottoman Empire having conquered the Byzantine Empire. There are also borrowings from other European languages, or from the common technical vocabulary of Europe.
In the latter case, the borrowings are usually taken in their French pronunciation.

Origin of the words in Turkish vocabulary

The 2005 edition of Güncel Türkçe Sözlük, the official dictionary of the Turkish language published by Turkish Language Association, contains 104,481 words, of which about 86% are Turkish and 14% are of foreign origin. Among the most significant foreign contributors to Turkish vocabulary are Armenian, Arabic, French, Persian, Italian, English, and Greek.

Nouns

Turkish nouns and pronouns have no grammatical gender, but have six grammatical cases: nominative or absolute, accusative, dative, locative, ablative, genitive. There are two grammatical numbers, singular and plural.

Nouns from nouns and adjectives

The suffix -ci attached to a noun denotes a person involved with what is named by the noun:
The suffix -lik attached to a noun or adjective denotes an abstraction, or an object involved with what is named by the noun:

Nouns from verbs

The noun in -im denoting an instance of action was mentioned in the introduction to Turkish grammar.
For more examples on word derivations, see the related article: List of replaced loanwords in Turkish.

Adjectives

Classification of adjectives

Adjectives can be distinguished as being
For an intensive form, the first consonant and vowel of a adjective can be reduplicated; a new consonant is added too, m, p, r, or s, but there is no simple rule for which one:
The determinative adjectives, or determiners, are an essential part of the language, although Turkish takes some of its determiners from Arabic and Persian.

Demonstrative adjectives

These are also demonstrative pronouns. Used with plural nouns, these adjectives represent the English "those" and "these"; there is no such inflexion of adjectives in Turkish.

Numerical adjectives

The cardinal numbers are built up in a regular way from the following:
Units follow multiples of ten; powers of ten come in descending order. For example:
The cardinals are generally not used alone, but a general word for a unit is used, such as:
Remembering that the plural suffix is not used when numbers are named, we have:
From the cardinal numbers, others can be derived with suffixes:
The cardinal bir "one" can be used as an indefinite article.
Other so-called indefinite adjectives might be listed as follows:
Added to a noun, -li or -siz indicates presence or absence, respectively, of what is named by the noun.
The suffix -li also indicates origin:
Finally, added to the verbal noun in -me, the suffix -li creates the necessitative verb.
The native speaker may perceive -meli as an indivisible suffix denoting compulsion.
Added to a noun for a person, -ce makes an adjective.

Adverbs

Adjectives can generally serve as adverbs:
The adjective might then be repeated, as noted earlier. A repeated noun also serves as an adverb:
The suffix -ce makes nouns and adjectives into adverbs. One source calls it the benzerlik or görelik eki, considering it as another case-ending.
Adverbs of place include:
These can also be treated as adjectives and nouns.
Also, the suffix -re can be added to the demonstrative pronouns o, bu, and şu, as well as to the interrogative pronoun ne, treated as a noun. The result has cases serving as adverbs of place:

With genitive and absolute

The following are used after the genitive pronouns benim, bizim, senin, sizin, onun, and kimin, and after the absolute case of other pronouns and nouns:
For example, a certain company may describe its soft drink as:
However, another company may say of itself:
Thus the label of postposition does not adequately describe gibi; Schaaik proposes calling it a predicate, because of its use in establishing similarity:
The particle ile can be both comitative and instrumental; it can also join the preceding word as a suffix. Examples:
Used after nouns and pronouns in the dative case are:
The following postpositions are case-forms of nouns with the third-person possessional suffix; they can be understood as forming nominal compounds, always indefinite, with the preceding words :
Some samples include:
Some Turkish conjunctions are borrowed from Persian and Arabic.

Logical conjunction

The cumulative sense of the English "A and B" can be expressed several ways:
For the adversative sense of "but" or "only", there are ama and fakat, also yalnız.
For emphasis: hem A hem B "both A and B".

Logical disjunction

For the sense of English "…or":
The pattern of the last two can be extended:
NE ABD NE AB TAM BAĞIMSIZ DEMOKRATİK TÜRKİYE
"Neither USA nor EU: Fully Independent Democratic Turkey"
;
Both çünkü and eğer are Persian; the latter is not generally needed, because the conditional form of the verb is available.

The conjunction ''ki''

The Persian conjunction ki brings to Turkish the Indo-European style of relating ideas :
Beklemesini istiyorum "Her-waiting I-desire"; but
İstiyorum ki beklesin "I-desire that he-wait."
Thus ki corresponds roughly to English "that", but with a broader sense:
Güneş batmıştı ki köye vardık "The-sun had-set that at-the-village we-arrived."
Kirazı yedim ki şeker gibi "The-cherry I-ate that sugar like."
The following is from a newspaper:
"Vahdettin ne yazık ki haindi"
...Bu iki açıklamadan anlıyoruz ki
Ecevit, Osmanlı Tarihi adlı bir kitap hazırlıyormuş...
Vahdettin, Tevfik Paşa ve Londra Konferansı hakkındaki açıklamaları gösteriyor ki
Sayın Ecevit, yakın tarihimizi ciddi olarak incelememiş,
bu konudaki güvenilir araştırmaları ve sağlam belgeleri görmemiş...
Diyor ki:
"Benim şahsen çocukluğumdan beri dinlediğim şeyler var..."
"...From these two accounts, we understand that
Ecevit is preparing a book called Ottoman History...
His accounts concerning Vahdettin, Tevfik Pasha and the London Conference show that
Mr Ecevit has not seriously studied our recent history,
has not seen trustworthy research and sound documentation on this subject...
He says that:
"'There are many things I heard personally from my childhood till today...'"

Verbs

The verb-stem temizle- "make clean" is the adjective temiz "clean" with the suffix -le-. Many verbs are formed from nouns or adjectives with -le:
The suffix -iş- indicates reciprocal action, which is expressed in English by "each other" or "one another".
)
but rather "to make love with each other."
Many causative verbs are formed with -dir-.