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Turkish is genderless, 100% regular, has a small inventory of sounds, few concatenations, and no articles. It is only because it is agglutinating that it has evaded the disgusting bigotry from the stupidest wastes of space in this world that is handed to English on a daily basis that Americans and Brits have to take.
You isolated the two 'easiest' aspects of of Turkish and ignored the many difficulties it presents. It doesn't have gender, but the difficulty of learning grammatical gender varies considerably from language to language. I found gender rather easy in the Romance languages, however it was more challenging in German.
Being 100% regular does not mean that a language is 'easy'. I've found that learning irregularities is a matter of rote memorization, whereas learning grammatical constructs requires understanding a concept. In my opinion the former is easier than the latter.
There are plenty of concatenations in Turkish, but I fail to see how they have any effect on the difficulty of a language.
Try telling people who have studied both that English is as difficult as Turkish. Most likely they'd laugh in your face.
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Originally Posted by xander.XVII
You don't understand.
In his mind, all Europeans criticise the English language deploring it.
Obviously it never crosses his mind that 99% of non-English speaking Europeans don't care about linguistics, that they completely ignore whatever absurd linguistic claim English-speaking users do.
Clearly you know this poster better than I do, but he strikes me as a very typical internet archetype, the 'armchair expert'. They form an opinion based on little or no knowledge of a subject and then use only information supporting their view (no matter how sparse) and ignore any information contradicting it (no matter how plentiful).
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I always love how English-speaking "superiority" supporter claim that English is free of arbitrary gender, hence it clearly is superior.
I think that claiming one language is 'superior' to another is silly.
....
I mean, how on earth is "break up=separate" ? Why? According to which logic?
To your reply, I have started to cool down now that I consider how I am getting nowhere with my bitterness, people think lard is worse than butter despite butter being more unhealthy yet what can a nutritionist do? (Lard is unhealthy in large amounts but butter is far worse contrary to popular belief, but clarifying it to remove the solids allows the saturated fat to not be absorbed the same way making it healthier....whatever) yet nobody cares about health food in the middle of Africa where they starve.
To answer the thing about phrasal verbs, it doesn't make sense but non-compositional compound words are not unheard of in many languages.
That is one way of telling apart an old language with creole like grammar (Riau Indonesian or Lao where
"take book see eat read, no?" could mean "Was I eating while reading with a book?") versus a true creole, the non-pidgin has idiomatics and non-analyzable words from accumulation despite being so pragmatically reliant. They may have compound words like "personmouth" meaning "population" or "leftright" meaning "house made for building bricks and pillows" or something like that.
Conservative IE take this to an extreme, Russian has 3 dozen prepositions whose meanings are almost non-existant outside the core ones. You have to know the meaning they undertake when used with a verb and noun along with the case they take based on the sentence. Entire pages take up grammar books for Russian prepositions and case governance since the exceptions are numerous but not for Korean, it only takes a page to briefly define the meaning of the 6 basic Korea postpositions used for EVERYTHING, and I mean it, since it is more literal. Are there huge pages discussing:
numerous declensions for Turkish cases?
numerous odd exceptions for case governance by a noun, adjective, or verb that is purely lexical?
numerous odd exceptions for postpositional (I know Turkish is left branching) governance by a noun or verb or adjective that is purely lexical?
Quirky case is a more Uralic thing naturally and even then it is controlled and a unique feature with enough room to be learnt without feeling something is odd or having an exploded head. The usage of prepositions in Russian is as difficult as having 10 genders honestly, the distribution is so all over.
Even English prepositional usage is a blemish, it is not as difficult as Russian at all, but it could use some trimming to be more literal than it is now. The syntactical fusionality of it is hard to define but shows old habits won't be lost for a while until it could finally get rid of them. Who even came up with the usage to tell time and date with them? On Saturday? At Night? In July? Why?
Last edited by Mahhammer; 08-12-2015 at 11:05 AM..
I would like to add that still a huge amount of non-anglic westerners (including south america and central for instance)| still sling mud at english when they do. Youtube comment sections or internet forums sections are filled with hundreds of thousands of posts of the stuff I talk about, not just 1 in 100, thousands at a time!
But now I admit I can never stop them, like anti-americanism/angloism it will always exist and be acceptable no matter how bigoted it is.
It will always be like arguing with 100000000 creationist 5 year olds, no matter how many debate classes and careful defence techniques from one's lawyer days one has, the 5 year olds will always laugh and think they have won by sheer virtue of their stupidity and the audience will side with them all day.
They can yell and throw racial or classist slurs all day but if I reply with "jerks!" in anger I will be tried with verbal assault or some crap.
Try telling people who have studied both that English is as difficult as Turkish. Most likely they'd laugh in your face.
While I admit I have not learned Turkish very well in the first place and forgot almost everything I had studied before, however, I think I would have been a nearly native speaker of Turkish if I had been putting some efforts for a couple of years.
I must have missed something. Would you tell me what parts of Turkish grammar are difficult? Teşekkür ederim!
There are plenty of concatenations in Turkish, but I fail to see how they have any effect on the difficulty of a language.
By concatenations, I refer to things such as lexical assignment of case such as a verb randomly using the genitive for no reason as a direct object with no semantics behind it, it is almost an exclusively Indo European thing, or idiomatic usage of prepositions. https://books.google.com.hk/books?id...page&q&f=false
Page 333, see how absurdly random prepositions are in Russian. The Slavic languages despite their brutal overweighing and almost useless case systems (which gets European/westerners in general fawning over them strangely enough like that "G" guy I mentioned before to the point of absurdity) have prepositional systems 10x more irregular, random, numerous, and difficult than case less languages like French or Italian. Some language like Vietnamese don't even really use them at all and just slap words after eachother like caveman talk. (Yet they say English is teh stoopidest no grammar language lolololol...)
Last edited by Mahhammer; 08-14-2015 at 01:51 AM..
The best language in this cruel world is the British English, I'd love to learn the London accent, so I'd seem a very refined man and at last .. but not the least a respected man
There is just one obstacle that separates me from this noble goal ...the grammar
Did you know it? it is the perfect language for rock and roll
The best language in this cruel world is the British English, I'd love to learn the London accent, so I'd seem a very refined man and at last .. but not the least a respected man
There is just one obstacle that separates me from this noble goal ...the grammar
Did you know it? it is the perfect language for rock and roll
Do you know that "British English" is not the "London accent", right?
Conservative IE take this to an extreme, Russian has 3 dozen prepositions whose meanings are almost non-existant outside the core ones. You have to know the meaning they undertake when used with a verb and noun along with the case they take based on the sentence. Entire pages take up grammar books for Russian prepositions and case governance since the exceptions are numerous but not for Korean, it only takes a page to briefly define the meaning of the 6 basic Korea postpositions used for EVERYTHING, and I mean it, since it is more literal. Are there huge pages discussing:
numerous declensions for Turkish cases?
numerous odd exceptions for case governance by a noun, adjective, or verb that is purely lexical?
numerous odd exceptions for postpositional (I know Turkish is left branching) governance by a noun or verb or adjective that is purely lexical?
I don’t know how many pages would be needed to explain Turkish cases and postpositions in Turkish. There are six cases plus a quasi-case (-le/-la), and the object of the genative case is declined to reflect the person and number of the one possessing it. There are standard postpositions, each of which uses either the nominative, dative or ablative case (in some examples they take the genative case for pronouns). Then there are adjectives of location and certain nouns which function as postpositions; the objects of these take the genative case and as such these ‘postposition’ are altered to reflect the number and person of their object and then the dative, ablative or locative case is added. But those things aren’t what makes Turkish challenging. Many pages are needed to explain participles, verbal nouns and gerunds in Turkish.
Anyway, the relative difficulty of Russian vs. Turkish isn’t what was being discussed. My comments were in response to your ridiculous assertion that Turkish was the easiest European language to learn. Since I have years of experience both with the language and observing other foreigners trying to learn it, I’m in a position to make relevant comments on the issue. It’s pretty obvious that you are not.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Mahhammer
I would like to add that still a huge amount of non-anglic westerners (including south america and central for instance)| still sling mud at english when they do. Youtube comment sections or internet forums sections are filled with hundreds of thousands of posts of the stuff I talk about, not just 1 in 100, thousands at a time!
But now I admit I can never stop them, like anti-americanism/angloism it will always exist and be acceptable no matter how bigoted it is.
Do these people just say that English an easy language to learn, or do they say that English is somehow inferior to their languages? The former I agree with, the latter I most definitely do not. Do all of those gender based declensions and multiple verb conjugations allow those languages to express more sophisticated ideas with greater clarity? I don’t think so. Do such things led a more ‘poetic’ quality to those languages? Perhaps, although it should be noted that the best Russian-born author of the 20th Century and one of the best, if not the best, Polish author of all times wrote in English. They had other languages at their disposal, ones with tons of declensions, but they preferred English in spite of its relative grammatical simplicity.
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It will always be like arguing with 100000000 creationist 5 year olds, no matter how many debate classes and careful defence techniques from one's lawyer days one has, the 5 year olds will always laugh and think they have won by sheer virtue of their stupidity and the audience will side with them all day.
Evolution: A scientific theory based upon a large amount of collected evidence.
Creationism: A way of willfully ignoring all evidence in order to cling onto an inaccurate view of the way things are.
If you want to apply your analogy to our debate, you’ve been the one playing the role of the creationist.
Quote:
They can yell and throw racial or classist slurs all day but if I reply with "jerks!" in anger I will be tried with verbal assault or some crap.
While I admit I have not learned Turkish very well in the first place and forgot almost everything I had studied before, however, I think I would have been a nearly native speaker of Turkish if I had been putting some efforts for a couple of years.
I must have missed something. Would you tell me what parts of Turkish grammar are difficult? Teşekkür ederim!
When starting their lessons, many students of Turkish believe the language to be fairly easy because the basic grammar is 'user-friendly'. Present continuous, simple past and simple future tenses are straight forward, though still more difficult than they are in English. The aortist is slightly more difficult, though still not too hard, and once you master that, the basic conditional isn't hard, either. I think the six cases, in their most basic usage, are pretty easy to learn as well. Generally, the major difficulty beginners have is with vowel harmony/consonant shifts, but Turks will generally understand you even if you mess that up.
After that, however, the language becomes considerably more difficult. I knew a woman from Thessalonika who had studied Turkish for three years at her university told me that she thought Turkish was a fairly easy language of the first year or so, but then found that it became rather difficult very quickly.
Here are some of the trickier things about Turkish:
1. Vowel harmony/consonant shifts. This is simply a matter of memorization and practice. If I were to try to explain the difficulty in comparison to the other languages I'd learned, I would say that it is harder to learn than gender in French and easier to learn than gender and declensions in German.
2. Word order. In terms of basic sentence structure, this is easy enough to get used to, but I find that it can cause headaches when applied to elements within the sentence, like clauses. If you are Japanese, though, I suppose this would not be an issue for you.
3. The idea of possession. The genitive clause is simple, but the object of the genitive is also declined(more like conjugated). If this only applied to nouns, it wouldn't be too hard, but it also applies to adverbs of place, nouns used to function as postpositions, verbal nouns, gerunds and participles. Here are some basic examples of the first two(for the sake of brevity, I will only use the first person)
Arka(back)
Arkamdan, arkandan, arkasından
From my back, from your back, from his/her/its back
Taraf (side)
Tarafımdan, tarafından, tarafından
By me, by you, by him/her/it
4. Gerunds, participles and verbal nouns can be a headache. Most foreigners don't even bother trying some of the relative clause constructions, preferring to use ki, which was imported from Farsi. While their intent can be understood, it causes their speech to sound stilted.
5. The inferential mood. Maybe this one isn't too hard, but it takes a little getting used to.
6. Agglutination. It is much harder to understand something when grammatical elements which would be represented as separate words in your language have been shoved together to form a single word. Even once you have completely learned all the elements, the act of using them or even understanding them is a hassle.
Here's an example using basic vocabulary words and intermediate level grammatical elements:
Tanıştıramayabileceğimiz devrimciler
Tanıştırmayabileceğiniz devrimciler
Last edited by yabanci; 08-16-2015 at 09:43 AM..
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