What are characteristics of Turkish that are unique or different from English and/or other languages?
Among the myriad differences between English and Turkish, three stand out. First, Turkish is an agglutinative language with an intimidatingly complex grammar. Root words take on many, many suffixes to indicate case, tense, and many other elements. So, when I say “Gidiyorum” in Turkish, that means “I am going.” This one word identifies the present progressive tense, the first person singular, and the verb in comparison to the three words needed in English. Second, Turkish has “vowel harmony” which governs the agglutination of suffixes. When you combine Turkish words, the vowels in the suffixes must “harmonize” with the vowels in the root word. As a general rule, the Turkish vowels e, i, ö, ü harmonize together, whereas vowels a, ı, o, u harmonize among themselves. Let’s take the root words “beden” (body) and “ruh” (spirit). We can add the same type of suffix to these to make new words: bedensel (physical) and ruhsal (spiritual). Even though the suffixes contain the same consonants (s, l
