h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Entry: How to Pronounce Turkish - A861220
Author: Gnomon - U151503

Essential knowledge if you're going to Turkey, as I am in two weeks' time.

The table is empty if looked at in goo.

I tried it in Alabaster and the writing is not white on a white background, so I can't explain that.

Otherwise - well done! In Germany, we are, of course, very familiar with Turkish and my son who spent a semester at university in Izmir came back full of the language and how it worked. I think he learnt more Turkish than physics, but that's what being young is about!

The Germans imitate the sound of Turkish by adding lots of ülülül, but this is not necessarily typical. My son says that the vowels can vary ad lib to match the rest of the word. Very poetic!

from what I've heard of Turkish, it is a very sonorous language full of ö and ü sounds.

Sorry, I forgot that my method of making table borders visible in Pliny means that the text is invisible in Goo. I'll go back to a plain table with no border in Pliny, so.

What a pity that nobody seems to fixing any of the problems in Pliny. I suspect that it's just a line wrong in a CSS file somewhere.

This is interesting but I feel I want to ask further questions.

Can you give us at least a few examples of Turkish words, if only to give us a feel for the language that we're trying to pronounce?

You say that the current Turkish script was devised in the 20th century. Is it worth saying what it was like before? Was it changed to make it easier for outsiders (and possibly locals too) to read and understand?

Good points. I'll talk about how Turkish was written before, and give some examples of Turkish words.

When learning Turkish, one of the first things you are told is the history of why they use our alphabet. It's a very political topic, but you're right, it should be mentioned.

Turks learn Arabic at the Koran school, but it's ancient Arabic of course and not modern Arabic, so I don't think they can converse with Arabs these days.

Only a short while ago, a Turkish colleague was showing an Algerian customer around our showroom. They were conversing in English. They couldn't get past greeting each other in Arabic. (I then took the customer over to show him our part of the showroom, and we continued in French.)

I've added a short explanation of why the Roman alphabet was adopted, and have put a few examples of Turkish phrases at the end of the entry.

I like 'My hovercraft is full of eels'!

Can any German speakers please comment on the following.

I added a couple of sentences explaining how to say the ö and ü sounds. Can you check them, please?

The ü one is fine.

For ö, I can't work out how you mean "uh" to be pronounced.

You need to purse your lips and say a posh "Oh" ... "Eow". or even perhaps "you", but without the "yer" sound at the beginning of the word. For those who can't really do that, a lazier form would just be to say "er". I'm not quite sure which of those is nearer to the Turkish. I'm trying to think of a German word with an ö in that everyone would know.

Oh - and I always thought of the I without the dot as a shwa. Is there a difference?

It is a schwa. I didn't think the Readers would know that term and I thought the term 'neutral vowel' was more common.

This entry is back in Peer Review at F48874?thread=8314992.