Monday, March 3, 2008

Gerceklestirilecektir or Why Turkish is Difficult

Gerceklestirilecektir is a word; more specifically it a noun with derivational and inflectional suffixes that change it into a verb, indicate tense, plurality, semantic role, etc. It means that something will come to pass (human dictionary: coworker). It was part of an email message delivered to me to my work email address.

Unlike French and Spanish words, which you can look up in a dictionary, in order to look up Turkish verbs, you need to know what the root is, how many suffixes are attached, and the boundaries between them all (f course you don't know this until you learn the language). In addition Turkish verbs carry much more information than Romance or Germanic verbs and are, therefore, pivotal to understanding the utterance. And then there is the whole vowel harmony thing, but that is another story.

On the plus side, strangers sometimes praise me for my "beautiful" Turkish. Would they feel differently if they knew I'd already been here for five months?