Muddling your way through Uzbek when you can read Turkish / Özbekçe'de yazılan sayfalar okunması

Meksika (Meksika Qoʻshma Shtatlari) poytaxti — Mexico shahri.

If you can read Turkish and are interested in languages as a way to obtain information and not merely to talk with people, it might be worth it to pick up a few basics about Uzbek, because with that alone you can often muddle through a page of info in Uzbek and understand some or most of what's going on. Here's one example, a piece of news from TRT today about Foreign Minister Ali Babacan's upcoming trip to Mexico from the 10th to 12th of December. Here's one sentence that a Turkish speaker would have little trouble with:

Tashqi ishlar vaziri Ali Babajan 10-12- dekabr kunlari, Meksikaga rasmiy ziyorat amalga oshiradi.

Uzbek doesn't use any letters with diacritics, so sh = ş. Vaziri means minister and is like the English vizier.

Dekabr = December.

D is often T in Uzbek, so tash is dış (foreign/outside). (not sure what qi is doing there though)

Ga is the same as e/a/ye/ya, denoting direction, so Meksikaga means "to Mexico".

A is often o in Uzbek, so ziyorat is ziyaret (visit)

G is often k in Uzbek, so kunlari is günleri (days).

One other note: plural in Uzbek is always -lar.



So where can you find some information on Uzbek in Turkish? Luckily the Turkish Wikipedia has a fairly detailed page on Uzbek grammar here. Here's one small part:

Casus	Özbekçe	Türkçe
Nom.	uy	ev
Akk.	uyni	evi
Dat.	uyga	eve
Lok.	uyda	evde
Abl.	uydan	evden
Gen.	uyning	evin

Yukarıda görülen -ni /ni/, -ga /gä/, -da /dä/, -dan /dän/, -ning /niñ/ ekleri (yani Suffixler) ses uyumuna göre değişmez!

Çokluk eki: -lar

• uylar: evler
• tillar: diller vs.