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

Unit 6 - Word-Formation Processes
(verb) vs ac› (adj), ekfli- (verb) vs ekfli (adj), a¤r›- (verb) vs a¤r› (noun). It seems
that some adjectival/nominal stems are identical to semantically similar verbal
stems. This may come as a surprise since adjectival and nominal stems are sharply
distinguished from verbal stems in Turkish. However, it is argued that these words
originally had a distinguishing morpheme -Ig whose final sound dropped out later
yielding identical words of different word classes: ac›g>ac›, ekflig>ekfli, a¤r›g>a¤r›
(Tietze, 2002: 86). Other examples of conversion can be formed by using nouns as
adjectives: pamuk, gümüfl, kömür; aorist third person singular verbs as nouns:
gelir, gider, okur, ç›kar, tükenmez, ç›kmaz (Atalay, 1946: 135-137; Korkmaz, 1962:
55, 60).
Borrowing
Another way of adding new words to a language is borrowing words from other
languages through which Turkish is largely expanded. Historically, Turkish
borrowed many words from other languages, such as Arabic, Persian and French;
but the attempts of language reformists liberated it from most of these foreign
elements. Yet, a flood of new borrowings in the last decade, especially from
English, could not be avoided. In this new era of globalization, many chain stores
of foreign origin mushroomed in the Turkish market with their “attractive” western
names. Their local competitors had to have at least names sounding like theirs,
and all of a sudden the 40-50 year-old non-English speaking mothers, when
communicating with their teenage children, had to deal with the trade names such
as Ice Boys, Mavi Jeans, Layla, Reyna, Levis, LC Waikiki, Club Mediterranean. They
also had to figure out whatever is meant by French fries, fish and chips, cheesecake,
hamburger, fast food, piercing, tattoo and so on. These are examples of
borrowings that are kept intact. However, some borrowings display sound
modifications: radyo, tren, kek, kart, ataç, problem, otorite, fingir bol. You may
have noticed so far that all borrowed words in Turkish are accepted as nouns;
therefore, they are allowed to enter into nominal inflections before they enter into
verbal inflections: fakslar, faksta, faks›, but not *faks›yorum, *fakst›m, or
*faksaca¤›m. Only after having been converted into a verb through noun-to-verb
derivation, can a borrowed word accept verbal inflection (Haig, 2003: 62): faks-lad›-m,
faks-la-y-aca¤-›m, faks-l-›yor-um.
A special type of borrowing is called loan-translation, or calque. This word
formation process allows word-for-word translations of new words into another
language. For example, katma de¤er vergisi is the Turkish translation of value
added tax. Other examples are do¤algaz ‘natural gas’, bilgi toplumu ‘information
society’, uzaktan kumanda ‘remote control’, ekran koruyucu ‘screen saver’, insan
haklar› ‘human rights’, toplam kalite ‘total quality’, k›z arkadafl ‘girl friend’.
Coinage
Sometimes speakers of a language create previously non-existent roots in language.
This is called coinage. The most common examples are trade names that eventually
become common words used to represent a particular product. For example, selpak
is in fact a trade name which is now used to refer to ‘tissue paper’ of any brand
in general. Other examples of this kind of generic use are aygaz ‘for gas’ and tursil
‘for ‘washing powder’.
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