TURKISH LANGUAGE

[s. 776] : This is an important member of the Ural-Altaic family of languages. It is thoroughly typical of the family (1) in tolerating no change or obscurement of the root through inflection, (2) in adding syllables or particles to the root for purposes of inflection, and (3) in giving the leading vowel of the root domination over the vowels and even consonants of such added syllables so as to secure euphony in the whole combination. In etymology the Turkish is remarkable for the regularity of its declensions and conjugations, and for the abundance of the forms of the verb, There is, especially in the Osmanli Turkish. properly speaking, but one conjugation of verbs. The verb is conjugated in great fullne of moods and tenses, with abundance of participial forms and verbal nouns. Moreover, by the incorporation of certain particles the simple verb may give rise to new verbs signifying a reflexive and a Another particle reciprocal quality of action. gives causative significance to the origmal or And, finally, by use of the the derived verbs. appropriate particle with each of the verbs of the three series, each one is made to produce a new verb with a negative and one with an imEach verb may be con po ible signification. jugated in all the moods and tenses and in the active and pa ive voices exactly on the model of the simple verb, producing some 20,000 tense, number, and person forms from each simple verb. The variety and compactne of expre ion thus secured is extraordinary. The principle of agglutination has its application also in the formation of adjectives, adverbs, and nouns, giving great breadth of expre ion in the use of the somewhat limited vocabulary. Most pronouns and all prepositions in Turkish are used in accordance with the same principle, following the noun which they limit as suffixes and having a regular place in the building of the word. The Turkish language lacks the relative pronoun and the article. It has neither gender nor declension of adjectives, and is defective in the comparison of adjectives. 758 In syntax the characteristic of Turkish is that while the subject occurs at or near the corn men cement of a paragraph, the sense is held in suspense while qualifying phrases and particulars of the most diverse description are brought in, the verb of the predicate, which stands at the very end of the paragraph, serving as the key to the whole enigma. The Eastern Turks of Turkestan and Mononce had an alphabet derived, perhaps, from the Syriac taught by early Nestor i an mi ionaries. At present, however, Arabic letters are used for writing Turkish, a dot or two being added to five of them in order to expre congolia sonant sounds not found in Arabic. This alphabet, being without vowels, is quite unsuited Various attempts have to writing Turkish. been made without succe to introduce Western alphabets. The Bashkir Turks of the Volga have adopted the Ru ian alphabet to some Christians living in Turkey who have adopted the Turkish language use the alphabets Hence we meet of their ancestors in writing. with Greco- Turkish and Armeno-Turkish, which are merely Turkish written with Greek or with extent. Armenian letters. The Turkish vocabulary is of limited extent, suggesting the limited range of ideas of pastoral peoples. All the dialects borrow freely from the Persian and Arabic languages. In the Osmanli Turkish, used in the Turkish Empire, this appropriation of Persian and Arabic words has been carried to a greater extent, and in the literary usage has borrowed phrases and grammatical forms to a degree which has raised its literature far above the comprehension of the unlearned, and has even threatened to destroy the very basis of the language. Of late years, however, a strong movement has set in at Constantinople for rejecting the use of unnaturalized Persian and Arabic words and phrases. This tends to bring the literary Turkish back within the comprehension of the ma es, and promises important results. The domain of the Turkish language is remark Turkish is spoken in vary able for its extent. ing universality of use in a wide belt extending from Chinese Mongolia westward to the Adriatic Sea. Its dialects are numerous, but on the whole may be cla ed as Eastern and Western, The the dividing line being the Caspian Sea. Eastern Turkish shows the language in its earlier stages of development, still preserving in Chinese Turlcestan the words added to roots in lieu of declension of nouns, which have become in the The Western Turkish mere case endings. TJighur of Kashgar and the Uzbek or Jagatai of Bokhara and Khiva are dialects closely related to the Osmanli or Ottoman Turkish, but not easily intelligible to the Ottomans because of grammatical differences and a curious substitution of related consonants, as “f” and “b” in the west for “p” and “m” in the east, etc. The Azerbaijan Turkish, found in Persia on the south of the Caspian Sea, and the Nogai Turkish and the Krim- (Crime an) Tatar dialect spoken in Ru ia between the northern end of the Caspian and the Black Sea, are so closely allied to the Osmanli or western language that Turkish newspapers published in the Crimea have subscribers in Constantinople. The Kumukhi dialect, spoken in Daghestan, and the Kazan Turkish, spoken in the plains of the Volga, belong rather to the eastern type. At 758 TnrklHli Language Kazan, by the way, TU-SHAN-CHAU: is the present center of the Eastern Turlvish. As we proceed northward we find in the Ural mount am regions the Bashkir Turkish and the Chuvash, which are strongly tinged with Finnish words. In the extreme northeast of Siberia, along the Lena River, the Yakut Turkish is strongly Mongolian in its affinities. The same is true of the Kirghiz dialects used by the nomads of the steppes. literary activity in; Constantinople, 1861; also Turkish-English, English Turkish Dictionary, London, 1880; Gibb, History of Turkish Poetry, 2 vols., London, 1902; Turkish Literature in World s Great Cla ics, London, 1901 Poole, Storv of Turkey, New York, 1888.; 777