Türkçe Dilbilimi - Turkish Language and Grammar from a Turkish point of view.

Turkish is not a Classical Structured Language

The Turkish grammar is not looked on by the Turks themselves as a Classical Structured Language. They have their own grammar rules which are not based on the Classical System (Latin, Greek etc.).

Most Turkish grammars for foreigners are however written by linguists and grammarians (usually in consort with a Turkish national) and they tend to follow what they themselves have learned at school or university in their learning lives.
Consequently we find all the best grammars are peppered with such classic terms as, accusative, dative, locative and ablative cases, together with such tenses and moods as those called the aorist, subjunctive etc.

I must own up to this fault myself, as having had a grammar school education in the Latin oriented 1940's, I too began to try learning Turkish from a Classical Grammar standpoint.

Turkish has its own Grammar Rules

It has taken me many years to realize that is incorrect, we would be far better to use the Turkish grammar nomenclature, such as Wide Tense for the Aorist tense and Noun Condition Movement Away for the Ablative case, and many other similar classical grammar terms should be discarded in my mind.

The reason that these thoughts were awakened in me was that I began receiving emails from persons, linguists, teachers, professors pointing out my sundry mistakes in my usage of grammar terms, in reality their received knowledge of Classic Language Grammar terms was the yardstick that they were applying to the Turkish language, and in this particular case to Manisa Turkish.

Now I do not pretend to know too much about grammar; as I have stated previously I only have a grammar schoolboy's level from 50 years ago. Therefore I started to think a little about our attitude and practice in teaching Turkish grammar.

The first thing that hit me was the concept of Vowel Harmony - I do not think that we find this in Classical Languages; it seems to be a Turkic language peculiarity. We also find some consonant changes to preserve phonetic euphony; we do have a little of consonant change in English but not for the same reason.

However, that which that affected my thinking most of all was the fact, that even Prof. G.E. Lewis could not find a suitable grammatical vehicle in either classical or English terminology for what I will call the "possessive relationship". He himself resorted to calling this by a Persian name "izafet", so even the most learned experts seemed to be stumped for a suitable grammatical description.

Turkish Grammar - the Turkish way

So I scoured the web and found some Turkish Grammar rules as stated in the Turkish way. These have been translated by Manisa Turkish, and for those learners who are interested it may open new roads to learning the language. We have to thank these anonymous Turkish authors - and we have published their writings without permission, for they are from many already published and open sources, solely for the cause of further education and at no profit, (in reality at a personal loss..!)

Manisa Turkish cannot really comment on the content of these pages on Turkish grammar from the Turkish point of view, but we are always ready to accept any contributions, corrections or suggestion for the betterment of this section on The Turkish Language.

If you think we have infringed any copyright - then please forgive us, there is no intention of plagiarism, just a publishing of received knowledge for those so interested.
Happy learning..