turkish phonology and morphology (türkçe ses ve b‹ç‹mb‹lg‹s‹)

Summary
It is through the use of language that we can
communicate with one another. And language surfaces
mainly as speech in our daily lives. We use other forms
of communication such as written language, but every
normal hearing and speaking person uses speech to
communicate with others. Speech is made up of
sequences of sounds that are language specific. Thus,
each language has a set of sounds that are meaningful
in that language. A sound may be meaningful in one
language but not in another. For example, some
languages spoken in Africa employ speech sounds
similar to the sound we make in Turkish when we want
to say ‘no’, sometimes written as ‘ç›k ç›k’. This sound is
a meaningful speech sound in those languages, whereas
in Turkish it is not a speech sound. Therefore, we have
to study sounds within a specific language to determine
which sounds are meaningful. Sounds that are
meaningful and can change the meaning are called
phonemes, variations of phonemes that do not change
meaning are called allophones. To determine whether
a sound is a phoneme we need to form minimal pairs.
Sounds are organized in certain ways to form words.
How sounds are organized, the sequencing of sounds,
and permissible sounds in different environments are
also language specific. Certain combinations of sounds
may be acceptable in one language but not in the other.
Thus, languages have their own sound rules. Phonetics
and phonology are two sub-fields in linguistics which
focus on speech sounds and sound rules that govern
speech.
Unit 1 - Why Study Sounds?
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