I need some clarification please regarding the pronounciation of the letter ð in turkish.

correct me if I am wrong.

We pronounce the letter ð the same as the french pronounce the R or the arabic "gh" as in the word Ghada, only when the letter comes between a consonent and a vowel.

When ð comes between two vowels we dont pronounce it and instead we stress more on the vowel that precedes it i.e. he first vowel.

Is that right?

Thank you for your help.

 As far as I know ð always comes after a vowel and has the effect of elongating that vowel.

eg sað is pronounced saa ,öðle is pronounced ööle etc.

There a no words that start with ð and I can´t think of any where it follows a consonant but I could be wrong.

Yeah thats what i do, like i think doðru is pronounced like the arabic one, i mena not doyru, but in arabci they always pronounce the word aða with a ghayn, but its between 2 vowels, so i dont know :S

and what about the word ait, why didnt they spell it aðýt? thats how it sounds liek to me at least! (is ait arabic? I dont think so but the way its written reminds me of arabic :S )

Thank you sonunda and doudi for your answers.

I think we need a native turkish speaker to help us on this one.

I am sure that we should pronounce the ð in the word aða.

We inherited this word from the ottoman era along with bey, baþa, and efendi. We still use them until today in lebanon. (bey was slightly modified and it became beyk)

If you look it up in the online dictionary you can listen to the pronunciation. Sounds like aaa to me!

Not only those! I learn so much everyday! I cant eblieve they have so amny words arabic and we have so amny turkish! Like today we still say oda in egypt! In egypt i hear both bey and beyk, so not sure :S

here are the arabic turkish words i learnt just today!

adet, daima,hayýr,ayný, acele,fakir,eþya,aslýnda (but we just aslýn)kýsým,zarf (and whats cool about zarf we use it in its grammatical meanign also We have zarf zaman and zarf makan , time adverb and place adverb )

that was all butt hat was today only

What´s a ´butt hat´?        

OMG im laughing sooo hard!

I cant believe i write these things!

wjats so bunny

and

butt hat!

looooooooooooooooooool!

LOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOL!

Some pronounce it and some dont.

Depends on where you came from ´Türkiye´de´

We had a thread about that before and some Turkish natives said they dont pronounce it,and said what sonunda said

And some pronounce it but not as plain ghan...something lighter,as mixed between ghan and ain in Arabic

They pronounce it from the throat,we pronounce it from the tongue..my teacher says that.

Guess the Gha has (been) eroded or diluted, just as the kha has. Thus Khayrli has become Hayrli and Khanum has become Hanum.

I tend to soften the gha further for ð, so it´s in between.   (N.B. am not a native speaker!)

This is from Geoffrey Lewis "Turkish Grammar":

(...) This ð, whether in borrowings or in native words, though audible as a "Northumbrian burr" of varying intensity in dialect, serves in standard Turkish to lenghten the preceeding vowel, a following vowel being swallowed up. (....) Between o and a, or o and u, it may be heard as a weak v or w: soðan ´onion´, soðuk ´cold´. (...) Otherwise, ð in conjuction with front vowels is heard as weak y: öðle ´noon´, deðer ´worth´.(...)

Thank you all for your replies. It´s been very helpful.

This is the first time I hear of northumbian burr and northumberland! we learn new things every day dont we

saðol

I still don´t know what the burr is

I´m just keeping ð simple for now - I´m not pronouncing it, lenghtening the previous vowel, and hoping that I´ll be somewhat understood

I have always thought that the "ð" sound, when you can hear it, is similar to "gli" in Italian - sort of a soft "y" sound made in the back of your palate, rather than the front. I think it´s called the "soft g" because you form the sound in the same part of your mouth as a regular g, but without the hard consonant noise.

In my version of Turkish which is standard Istanbul Turkish, "ð" is a consonant (in my opinion a semiwovel) which is difficult to notice as it is merely an instantaneous and barely noticable narrowing of the glottal opening. For all practical purposes, you could prolong the preceding wovel to get a similar effect.

Wikipedia says in Azerbeijani, Crimean and Tartarian Turkish it can be used at the beginning of a word. In Turkey´s Turkish it is never used like that.