zippy

hello there,

I know some latin from school and learned turkish in the last years. Is it because I don't remember latin properly, or do the two languages really have a lot in common?! I didn't find anything about it on the internet and there is no reasonable historical explanation for that stunning similarities.
Does any of you know both languages? what do you thing about it? am I dreaming?!

thanks

zippy

harika

Hi zippy

I don't know any latin, but I do know a piece of history: soon after the Turkish Republic was declared, the Turkish Alphabet was changed from Ottoman script to a Latin based script. Ottoman script was based on the Arabic alphabetic script but it did not cover the phoenetics of Turkish adequately, so Kemal Atatürk intoduced the new latin alphabet. So if the similarities you see are linked to the alphabet, that might help explain it.

Lina

There's an easier explanation :

both are IndoEuropean languages, i.e. they come from a same original language called "IndoEuropean" by grammarians, because its extent was from India to Europe. It disappeared a long time ago, for it evolved into the languages we know now. Thus, nowadays, its forms are only reconstituted ones, but this evolution explains why languages separated by thousands of kilometres are sometimes quite similar. It is true for Latin and Turkish, but Sanskrit and Latin are both quite close too, though there were very very few contacts between Indian and Latin people.

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zippy

hello and thanks for your interest !

Maybe I should try to explain what I mean with similarities.
the logic behind the two languages seems the same to me. not only the syntax and the same way of using the verbs, also the whole construction of the sentences. it is very strange that latin, as the "mother" of so many european languages, has a totally different syntax than the modern tongues, but is similar to turkish, that belongs to the altaic language family. I will try to show what I am talking about:

e.g.:

gelmek - to come ("mek" ist the stem)

gel-iyor-um - I come
gel-iyor-sun - you come
gel-iyor - he/she/it comes
gel-iyor-uz - we come
gel-iyor-sunuz - you come
gel-iyor-lar - they come

"iyor" stands for present tense

everything you can possibly do to a verb is added at the end, there are no auxillary verbs or anything like it. for example:

gel-e-me-(y)-eceğ-im - I won't be able to come

gel(stem) + e(possibility) + me(negation) +eceğ(future) + im(1.person)

and that goes on and on, all the tenses,conditions,personal endings are added at the end.

more examples:

Istanbul'a / gittiğim / gün / yağmur / yağıyordu.
(it was raining the day I went to Istanbul.)

literally:
to Istanbul / me gone / day / rain / was raining


bunu al-a-maz-dı-m
(I couldn't have taken it.)

literally:
that take-possibility-negation-past tense-personal ending.

I would discribe latin as a quite "concentrated" language and turkish is just the same. also the use of so many genitives and gerunds. what we would express with a contact clause is expressed with those two grammatical forms in turkish. and the old SOP rule in latin works perfect for turkish,too.

even the personal endings and the cases are the same. although the five years of latin at school were a nightmare for me, it helped me a lot with turkish. while all the other students had to get used to the completely different syntax and way of thinking in turkish, I kind of knew it already from latin. locative? ablative? gerunde? piece of cake !
my latin teacher would certainly start to cry if he ever read this .
of course latin is much more complicated than turkish. Thank god there are no articles and genders of the words!

but still, it is strange that obviously no one ever noticed this before. maybe this similarity only appears to me. anyway, it helped!


greetings from turkey

zippy

Lina

Actually, Turkish and Latin don't exactly "work" the same way. I don't know the English precise terms and I don't have now an English dictionnary worth this name, so if there's an English speaking student in linguistics here, he/she is welcome , but I'll try to explain you :

there are 3 types of "development" for languages :

- first, the "isolating" type ( in French : "type isolant" ), i.e. one word for one idea. So, "these great tables" = four words : one for the plural, one for the demonstrative, one for "great" and one for "table". This is the type of Chinese, for instance.

- then, "agglomerating" type ( in French : "type agglutinant" ) : different suffixes are added to the stem ; one suffix = one idea. This is the type of Turkish. That's why languages of this type very often have quite long words ( winner among all categories : Eskimo...!!!! ).

- and eventually, the "flexionnal" type ( in French: "type flexionnel" ), which is, you're right, quite close to the second one : one suffix can express several ideas. This is the type of Latin. The suffix "-us" in "dominus", for instance, means "plural masculine nominative".


Not sure I'm quite clear here...


Anyway, I'd like to thank my compared grammar teacher : sir, I'm sorry, I miss, every Tuesday, the first ten minutes of your lesson, for I don't really master teleportation , BUT I think it quite interesting...!

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harika

Your examples got me very interested, zippy, so I looked it up for myself. As you said, there don't seem to be web pages directly addressing the similarities between Turkish and Latin grammar. I did however, find a short paper someone wrote on similarities they noticed between Hungarian (and agglutinative languages in general) and classic latin. He did a good comparison that was interesting to read.

His conclusion was that while classic latin appears to be much more similar in structure to agglutinative languages than it is to today's Romance languages, there is no real evidence that the they are related. I've included the link.

Latin Magyar Grammar

Lina

Yes, interesting comparison, indeed.

But Latin is not an agglutinative language. It doesn't function this way.

The resemblances come, I think, from the fact that Latin ang Magyar are both languages with declensions, though they don't belong to the same linguistic branch. But it doesn't necessarily mean that there are relations between them.

Anyway, in linguistics, syntax is not considered a pertinent criterium to distinguish or associate languages, for they quite often borrow one to the other, especially when they are geographically close, as Latin and Magyar. The pertinent criteria are phonetics, morphology and lexicon. And the author of the site almost only compares both syntaxes.

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