When you begin learning Turkish, there is one thing to get straight at the outset: its syntax branches to the left, and its morphology branches to the right.
For the uninitiated: if the head of a phrase comes after its dependents, the phrase is left-branching—it unfolds leftwards from the head. If it comes before them, it is right-branching. English is usually reckoned to favour the left: we say a new book, big house. French leans the other way: Maison Blanche, literally “House White.”
Though even here nothing is tidy. English will happily put a participle in front of a noun—the invited guests—but far prefers to hang anything bulkier off the back: the guests invited on Tuesday. Easier on the ear and on the understanding alike. French does love its adjectives after the noun, but not all of them: beau, bon, grand march out in front. And occasionally position alters meaning outright: ancien professeur is a former teacher; professeur ancien is an elderly one.
Prepositions in European languages generally stand before the noun—otherwise we should hardly call them pre-positions. English, however, is prone to mutiny, and produces particles that trail behind: get up, calm down, look after.1
Morphologically the Indo-European languages are creatures of divided loyalty: they inflect on both sides of the root at once. Consider that celebrated monster antidisestablishmentarianism—two prefixes, anti- and dis-, the root establish, and then -ment, -arian and -ism piling up behind. The whole morphological palette, deployed in both directions.
Turkish is agglutinative and strict: suffixes only, and only after the root. Take kesilmediler, “they were not cut.” Root kes- (cut) + -il (passive) + -me (negation) + -di (past) + -ler (plural). Everything in its proper order, like an IKEA instruction sheet.
There are no prefixes in Turkish at all—only rightward growth. And the same principle governs its constructions of dependency. Postpositions come exclusively after the noun: ile (‘with’) is essentially a suffix by now. So is göre (‘according to’)—never in front of the word it governs.
And now for the good part: spatial relations in Turkish are expressed by nouns. Not “under the table” but “at the table’s underneath”—masanın altında. Masa is the table, alt is the underside, masanın is “of the table,” altı is “its underside,” altında is “in its underside.” Difficult? Certainly. But there is a symmetry to it, and a beauty.
Word order is a further pleasure for the syntactician. The European standard is SVO: subject, verb, object. Turkish is SOV: subject, object, verb. The verb comes at the end always. Not as in German, where it goes to the end in subordinate clauses if it feels like it—but always, always.
If the objects run long, a positive Bosphorus opens between the subject and its verb. The Turks have made their peace with this and invented a piece of punctuational first aid: the subject may be marked off with a comma, so that you do not lose it halfway across. For instance:
O, arkadaşlarıyla birlikte ofise geç geldi.
He, friends-his-with together office-to late came.
The words inside the chasm arrange themselves by proximity to the verb: late stands nearer than where, and where nearer than with whom. Which is perfectly logical—the action develops from set-up to climax, like a well-structured play.
But the summit of left-branching is the subordinate clause. Or rather its absence. Turkish replaces subordinate clauses with constructions built on verbal nouns. Thus:
Dün bizimle birlikte tatile gelmemeye karar verdiğini söyledi.
Word for word: [He or she] yesterday us-with together holiday-to coming-not decision-taking-his-about announced.
First the adverb “yesterday”; then the group concerning the decision, inside which hides a further group concerning the not-going. The word for “said” comes last, as it must. And the subject is absent altogether—because if it is clear from context, why repeat oneself?
A difference of grammar on this scale is not a formality. It genuinely breaks the mould for the learner. Between French and Spanish, cousins that they are, one can very nearly swap the words out and carry on. With Turkish that will not answer. You have to learn to think along another set of rails. What is required here is honest syntactic parsing.
So far I have not come across a teaching method that eases this transition—beyond the good old communicative approach. Perhaps I have simply been unlucky. Or perhaps it really is unploughed ground for the methodologists.
- Strictly speaking, these particles do the work of prefixes, altering the sense of the verb, exactly as the Latinate prefixes do in submit, permit, omit, commit, transmit—one root, five verbs, all the difference made at the front. The Germanic languages simply took a freer view of where such an element might sit. German goes furthest of all: its separable prefixes may be attached directly to the front of the verb, or have another prefix inserted between prefix and root, or be flung to the very end of the sentence and left there. ↩︎
