The Turkish language is spread over a large geographical area in Europe and Asia; recent studies show that this language goes back 5500 years,and perhaps even 8500. At the same time, it is one of the most widely spoken tongues in the world - the sixth most widely spoken , to be precise. It is spoken in the Azeri, the Türkmen, the Tartar, the Uzbek, the Baskurti, the Nogay, the Kyrgyz, the Kazakh, the Yakuti, the Cuvas and other dialects. Turkish belongs to the Altaic branch of the Ural-Altaic family of languages, and thus is closely related to Mongolian, Manchu-Tungus, Korean, and perhaps Japanese. Some scholars have maintained that these resemblances are not fundamental, but rather the result of borrowings, however comparative Altaistic studies in recent years demonstrate that the languages we have listed all go back to a common Ur-Altaic.

Turkish is a very ancient language, with a flawless phonetic, morphological and syntactic structure, and at the same time possesses a wealth of vocabulary. The fundamental features which distinguish the Ural-Altaic languages from the Indo-European are as follows:

1. Vowel harmony, a feature of all Ural-Altaic tongues.
2. The absence of gender.
3. Agglutination
4. Adjectives precede nouns.
5. Verbs come at the end of the sentence. The name of the script of the language spoken in Turkey proper, the dialect falls into the southwestern dialects of the Western Turkish language family and also into the dialects of the Oguz Türkmen language group. When the Turkish spoken in Turkey is considered in a historical context, it can be classified according to three separate periods because of the inherent characteristics of each of the periods:

1. Old Anatolian Turkish (old Ottoman - between the 13th and the 15th centuries)

2. Ottoman Turkish (from the 16th to the 19th century)

3. 20th century Turkish

(source: http://www.mfa.gov.tr/grupc/ca/caf/default.htm)

Comparing features of Altaic languages with Indo-Europian group, there can be noticed some strong similarities with certain IE languages:

Adjective precedes the noun: it is the feature of majority of IE languages – or it is prefered at least, especially in German and Slavic languages, those which do not make a strong mix with native non-IE languages (like French, e. g.). The best example is Russian – inverted position of noun and adjective changes the meaning and the very structure of the sentence, just like in Turkish: синий карандаш – blue pencil; карандаш синий – the pencil is blue. In some Slavic languages the combination noun+adjective can be used only as "poetic", and in some it is just unimpossible.

The position of verb in the sentence: in Slavic languages, the main verb often takes the place on the very end of the sentence. It is not obligatory order, for Slavic languages are of rather unconstrained syntax, but as we go more into the past, the more we find that structure, so we can suppose it could be obligatory order in ancient times.

One more interesting similarity is the use of "var" construction in many Slavic languages, (which can exist alone or along with active use of the verb "to have" in meaning "to posess"). The structure "At me there are two children" means nothing in German and Roman languages, but in Slavic languages the meaning is: "I have two children".

Also, there are no articles in Slavic languages (exept Macedonian and Bulgarian, which are probably influenced by Greek).

In further comparison, we can see many other semantic similarities, e.g. in specific use of some verbs – "to drink pills" in Serbo-Croation – or "to drink tobacco" (archaic).

What is the point: many scholars classify the Indo-European sub-branches into a Satem group and a Centum group. Geographically, the "eastern" languages belong in the Satem group: Indo-Iranian and Balto-Slavic. We can only suppose that Satem languages are much closer to Altaic languages than it is obvious, and in praxis it reffers to the most of Slavic languages.

I'd like to know if there is any group of languages where DATIVE (the 3rd noun case) is used instead of possessive forms, along with possesive genitive. In IE group, that structure exists only in Slavic languages, so I suppose it must have a correspondent form in some eastern languages?

Regards to all linguistics-lovers.

Yes, that's true. But Hungarian (Magyar) and Finnish languages are not Indo-European. They are more similar to eastern groups like Altaic. I hope it can be seen here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:IE0500BP.png#file

But if you have more information about articles in proto-Turkish language, I'd be thankful for them!

Regards,
D.

I googled just to find a picture, but never tried to find about linguistics and ethimology on Internet, I still use my good old books. You cannot always be sure if the source is to be trusted on net. You know some good - and serious - links?

Regards,
D.

Thank you so much! Not only for the link, but also for idea... my old-fashioned mind still works on old-fashioned frequencies.

All the best,
Duda

One thing I am not sure about, when the Turkish language changed from Arabic to Turkish in the 1920's did the spoken language change as well as the written language? As it didnt evolve how did people learn it?