Hey All,

First I´d like to thank you for this great website. I was going through my linguistics book when I read this:

"In Turkish, a word may not begin with two consonants. When words are borrowed into Turkish, an epenthetic vowel is inserted between certain sequences of two intial consonants, creating a new and premissible sequence.

Ex. Train ---> tiren

      club----> Kylüp

      sport---> s*por (* wierd symbol I believe the printer didn´t manage to write it)

when I checked the dictionary for the word - sport I got spor.

To summarize:

Q1) is the rule correct? (Turkish can´t have two Consonants in a row beginning of words?)

Q2) If it´s true then is sport and exception to the rule?

Thankz in advance!

See the comments from si++ below. I have seen many Turkish words starting with a double consonant, and I make the following observations.

One of the words for club is kulüp.

Tren (train), spor (sport), klima (air-conditioning), krem (cream), kredi (credit), kriz (crisis), trafik (traffic) are all Turkish words. Most are probably modifications of borrowed words.

Similarly there´s a general rule about avoiding 2 vowels in a row for Turkish words, but this rule is often broken for borrowed words. (saat - hour/time, maalesef - unfortunately, camii - the mosque, tabii - naturally/off course)

CC (consonant+consonant) combo at the begining of a syllable is against the Turkish pronounciation.

Those who speak european languages are used to it. But common people who don´t speak any foreign language would turn it into a CVC:

tren -> tiren

spor -> sıpor

klima -> kılima

krem - kırem

kredi -> kıredi

kriz -> kıriz

trafik -> tırafik

But they are not reflected in the written language (as in kulüp).

The last reply is very useful.  When I read the words and their pronunciation they sounded more Turkish - I shall try to remember to insert the invisible vowel in there when I am speaking!

I think that I read that words like saat, camii, etc keep their double consonent because they are Arabic in origin - is this correct?

Oh, thanks.

Usually we say Arabic words in  our Turkish way. Some people with Arabic knowledge want to preserve those words as close as their Arabic pronounciation but usually they get changed.

Saat is usually pronounced by common people as sat as one syllable rather than two with a longish a.

Camii has become more like camisi in daily speech. Though you would corrected by some people that camisi is wrong and it should be camii.

Sultanahmet camii -> Sultanahmet camisi

And here are some more examples of CC to VCC mutation where first C is s:

skumbri -> uskumru

station -> istasyon

scala -> iskele

squelette -> iskelet

Scutari -> Üsküdar

These are old borrowings so they reflect the sound changes in written language.

Yes this makes sense to me because it echoes the similar change from in English where words have been borrowed from French, eg ecole in French to school in English - the -V ´s´ in a number of languages seems to act in this way.

As a linguistics graduate, the more of these loose rules I can find the better!  Especially as my aging brain doesn´t pick it up as easily as a child!

What about film ? - filim ? does not begin with 2 consonants..

Where I live in the North East of England we also say ´filim´ instead of film! I think this is because the ´l´ and ´m´ are close together where they are said in the mouth, so it is easier to put a buffer vowel in the middle.

I say filum! (just for a laugh really)

It drops the second i if a suffix of -V(C) is added.

filim

filmi (accusative of film)

filme (dative of film)

filmin (genitive of film)

etc.

We have similar examples of Arabic borrowings

(Arabic wasf) vasıf but vasfı vasfında etc.

(Arabic kasd) kasıt kasdı (notice the consonant mutation also) etc

(Arabic keyf) keyif keyfim keyfi etc

...

Thank you so much!

linguistics textbooks we have are not always correct! that´s why I needed to double check. 

Thank you so much for the full detailed explanation!

The rule is generally true of Turkish phonology, and often this was resolved by adding a vowel before the troublesome consonant cluster. However as such words have become more common, pronouncing them without an added vowel has become more prestigious. So while a word like "skubria" became "Uskumru" and Sparta and Smirni became "Isparta" and "Izmir," today it would sound very provincial to say "ispor" instead of "sIpor" or "istres" instead of "sİtres".

Another such rule is that real Turkish words never begin with L or R. And in Anatolian poetry and speech in some areas you see "ilmon" instead of "limon" and "ireyhan" instead of "reyhan," but standard Turkish has now left this phenomenon behind.