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

Phonological Processes in
Turkish
INTRODUCTION
How do we, as native speakers of Turkish, know that ‘dolap’ and ‘dolab›’, ‘burun’
and ‘burnu’ are related in meaning although they have different forms?
“Phonology is concerned with the organization of speech” (Clark and Yallop,
1991:2). Described as such, phonology deals with how sounds pattern together.
Each language has its own set of rules of which sounds can occur together and
which sounds cannot, which sounds can occur in which environment or position
within a word. This unit focuses on three major phonological processes in Turkish
and how the rules of those processes are described.
PHONOLOGY
All languages have rules about how speech is organized. These rules are language
specific in that each language has its own phonological rules and a phonological
rule may occur in one language while not in other languages. Or, the same
phonological rule may occur in different languages with some variations. A
language, for example, may allow certain sound sequences but not others.
Knowing a language means knowing which sound sequences are permissible and
which sound sequences are not permissible in that language. Consider the following
nonsense words (words that do not have meaning in Turkish). Which of the
following could be acceptable Turkish words?
(1) (I) cunur
(II) kambat
(III) sortunk
(IV) skinez
(V) arktrat
Based on your intuitions, you probably said that (I), (II), and (III) could be
Turkish words but (IV) and (V) could not be Turkish words. (I) could be a Turkish
word because all the sounds in ‘cunur’ occur in Turkish. Furthermore, the
combination of the sounds is such that it is permissible in Turkish. Similarly,
because the sounds and the order of the sounds comply with the rules of Turkish,
(II) could be a Turkish word also. (III) does not seem like a Turkish word at first
glance because of the word-final ‘-nk’ combination, but that is a permissible