Interlinear books are bilingual translations where the original has a translation right below each word or expression. Try them out on Interlinear Books.
For multilingual verb conjugation, try CoolJugator - a tool that can currently conjugate in dozens of different languages. It also recognizes forms and provides examples for each verb.
After 69 years of radio broadcasts, Voice of America stopped broadcasting in Turkish on the 1st of July. Deutsche Welle has been doing the same recently, stopping radio broadcasts in certain languages in exchange for more focus on TV and online services. VOA Turkish online is here, and with a selection of languages including Tigrigna and Afan Oromo, they are certainly not doing any pruning, simply focusing on certain types of media over others.
I don't use Tumblr but for those that do, now it's in Turkish. This is now the sixth language after English, German, French, Italian and Japanese. Notably absent: Spanish and Portuguese.
Here's something I missed (also here and here) from about a week ago - Twitter is now in Turkish, its ninth language. The first language to be added on was Japanese, and after that also came Italian, Spanish, Korean, French, Russian, and German. For a site like Twitter that is easy to navigate languages like Japanese, Korean, Russian and Turkish are especially important, since they are fairly large with a relatively low English proficiency. In Western Europe many are capable of navigating sites as simple as Twitter without a translation in their own language, though of course one is always welcome.
Let's take a look at some of the last article:
A Turkish edition of Twitter, one of the most popular social websites in the world with 200 million users, has gone into service. An announcement on the site's blog said that Turkish and Russian had been added.
Oops, I guess it's Turkish and Russian then. Changing the title...
In a study carried out by the company ComScore, Turkey is in eighth place in terms of number of users per capita. In first place is the Netherlands with 26.8%, and Turkish is at 16.6%. The study estimates that there are 4 million Turkish users.
From Welt a few days ago, the Komische Oper Berlin plans to have Turkish and French subtitles now in its performances in addition to English. Having Turkish subtitles for an opera would be a first for Germany. Apparently they are also planning a bilingual German-Turkish opera but have not given any details on that. Hopefully it's not just an opera about integration or "what am I, German or Turkish? Where does my heart truly lie?" or something generic of that sort.
Read more...
Here's something I noticed in the Turkish media today - Turkey's CHP (originally the leading party, in opposition for quite some time now but finally rid of Deniz Baykal as leader) now has an Arabic version of its website. It looks like this:
This is the first language to be added after English.
Next up? According to the article in the first link, they are preparing a Russian version as the next language.
Read more...
Check it out, now the DLI's Global Language Online Support System page has a few texts in Turkmen - four in total. I haven't kept an accurate check on exactly which languages are there but I'm fairly sure that Turkmen is the only language that has been added since North Korean (not a different language from South Korean, just Korean with a few differences).
Turkmen resources are still extremely scarce though so for anyone going to Turkmenistan that only has access to online resources I would still recommend sticking with standard Turkish as much as possible, and then only switching over to the limited Turkmen resources out there about two weeks before leaving in order to learn about how they differ. Back in 2008 I wrote a post about how Turkmen and Azeri can become quite legible to a Turkish speaker simply by replacing letters here and there, so going all out on standard Turkish and then following it up by getting yourself used to the different orthography and some other differences is usually the most effective way in a pinch. A quick text replacement turns this:
Garaşsyz we baky Bitarap Türkmenistan döwleti Gundogaryn we Gunbataryn kop yuertlaryna tarao gidyan gadymy “Beýik Ýupek” sowda ýollarynyň çatrygynda, geografik taýdan innan amatly ýerde ýerleşýar. Şona gora-de, Türkmenistanyň territoriýasynyn usti bilen Gadymy we Orta asyr dowurlerinde hem dunya bazarlaryna tarap kerwen yollary, yodalary gecipdir.
into this:
Garaşsız ve bakı Bitarap Türkmenistan dövleti Gundogarın ve Gunbatarın kop ıuertlarına tarao gidıan gadımı “Beyik yupek” sovda yollarının çatrıgında, geografik taydan innan amatlı yerde yerleşyar. Şona gora-de, Türkmenistanın territoriyasının usti bilen Gadımı ve Orta asır dovurlerinde hem dunıa bazarlarına tarap kerven ıolları, ıodaları gecipdir.
which is not perfect (especially yodalary to ıodaları) but overall much easier to read if you know Turkish.
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Actually from about two weeks ago. Iran and Turkey never seem to have competent interpreters at their joint conferences in spite of their geographic proximity and all the Azeri speakers (10 - 18 million or so) in the northwest. I remember reading when this first made the news (couldn't find a video that day and forgot about it until now) that this wasn't the first time.
What she asks him at around 1:20 is this:
Türkiye'nin Iran'ın nükleer çalışmalarındaki müzakerelerde verdiği destek eksen kayması olarak değerlendirilidi. Siz bu iddialara katılıyor musunuz? Neler diliyorsunuz? Türkiye'nin son zamanlardaki dış politikasıyla ilgili, teşekkürler.
Translation: Getting Turkey's support through negotiations for Iran's nuclear efforts is being seen as an axis shift (sea change, etc.). Do you agree with that? What would you like (this part is a bit hard to hear but I think she said diliyorsunuz) in regards to Turkey's recent foreign policy, thank you.
No translation. She is asked to repeat the question and says:
Türkiye'nin nükleer çalışmalarınızdaki müzakerelerde verdiği destek, Batı'da Türkiye'nin eksen kayması yaşadığı önünde yorumlandı. Sizin yorumunuz ne olacak, bu konuyla ilgili. Teşekkürler.
The support from Turkey for your nuclear efforts through negotiations is being seen as an axis shift in the West. What is your opinion on this, thank you.
Uh....no interpretation. Ahmadinejad (who knows some Turkish) asks her to tekrar yavaş yavaş (again, slowly). She tries again:
Eh...Türkiye'nin Iran'a verdiği destek nükleer çalışmalarındaki müzakerelerde...
Eh...Turkey's support to Iran in its nuclear efforts, in the negotiations...
Ahmadinejad: Mütercim yorulmuş. (The translator's tired.)
Came across this article just now in Turkish that I'm sure is out there in English as well, which says that according to the Institute of Education and National Language Centre (translated from Turkish so that might not be their exact names) 41% of students in London do not have English as a first language, up from 33% a decade earlier. Of the non-English languages used as a mother tongue, Turkish is in 10th place. A total of 233 different languages are spoken by the 450,000 students in London, and other languages after the 59% that speak English are Punjabi, Arabic, Gujarati, Turkish, French, and Yoruba.
The article ends by saying there are a total of 300,000 Turks living in London.
Now let's see if we can find an article in English on this...here's one. Interesting...looks like Chinese has actually declined over the past decade in contrast to most of the others.
Here's a short but informative article on the Gagauz, the majority Orthodox Christian but (nearly) Turkish-speaking group concentrated mostly in Moldova.
The Turkish Language and Culture Faculty from Near East University (Yakın Doğu Üniversitesi, YDÜ) held a conference on Gagauz Turkish. There the Turkolog Erdoğan Saracoğlu said that the large majority of the Christian Turk Gagauz live in Moldova, while others live in Ukraine, Russia, East Kazakhstan, Bulgaria, Romania, Greece and Macedonia. According to a USSR census in 1989 there were a total of 197,164 Gagauz in the country (which included Moldova at the time). According to Saracoğlu there are a total of up to 5,000 Gagauz in Bulgaria, and small groups of Gagauz in Kazakhstan and Central Asia who fled Bessarabia from 1908 to 1914. Saracoğlu said that the total Gagauz population is about 500,000.
Here's a short article in Turkish on street signs in Kirkuk written in Turkish, due to the Turkmen population there. The total number in Iraq is anywhere from 500,000 to 3 million.
According to the 4th article of the constitution of Iraq, areas with large number of ethnic minorities are permitted to have signs written in their language as well as Arabic. In areas with a large Turkmen population (Kirkuk, Arbil, Tal Afar, Mosul) schools can be conducted in Turkish, and one can find TV, radio and newspapers in Turkish as well.
Although the language spoken by Iraqi Turkmens is South Azeri (not Turkmen as spoken in Turkmenistan), if you look at the home page for the Iraqi Turkmen Front (Irak Türkmen Cephesi) you can see that it's written in standard Turkish, not Azerbaijani as seen in Azerbaijan. Their page is also written in English, Arabic, and Persian.
Read more...
German traffic signs in the village of Dereköseler in the district of Çaycuma in Zonguldak are attracting the attention of expatriates. Davut Inam who is retired after working 39 years in Germany felt the need for traffic signs and set them up about 10 years ago, surprising observers. In the village where a large part of the population lives in Germany, the large number of signs in German such as "no stopping", "no parking" and "stop" attracts the attention of drivers.
So that begs the question of why? Let's turn to the Turkish Wikipedia's page on Dereköseler. It's absolutely hilarious. Somebody needs to do a better job patrolling recent edits. Some of the gems from the page:
Köyde Ne Gariptir ki Trafik vb. İşaretler Almancadır..
= The village is so weird traffic etc. signs are German.
Bu sayfalara yazanları ciddiyete davet ediyorum. Saygısızlık hiçde hoş değil.
I ask the people writing this page to be serious. The lack of respect isn't nice at all.
Okay, no help there. Let's search images...here's one, which has Einbahnstraße and Überholen von (tractor symbol?) frei written in German. Looks like it's a simple
Ah, here's a better article. The normal population of the village is 1,317 but in the summer months the returning of expats raises it to over 2000.
Read more...
An article here in Turkish today approves of plans within Kazakhstan to increase the number of people that speak Kazakh, no surprise given that Kazakh is also a Turkic language and extremely easy for Turks to learn.
The Kazakhstan Minister of Culture Muhtar Kul-Muhammed said that 95% of the population in Kazakhstan would speak Kazakh by 2020. Muhtar Kul-Muhammed made a presentation at a government meeting called the 'Kazakh Development Plan 2011-2020' which aims to have some courses offered in Kazakh at every university.
He also said that Kazakh would also have to be taught at kindergartens and foreign language schools. At the moment 70% of the population is capable of speaking in Kazakh whereas 90% know Russian. Bakan Kul-Muhammed said that "Of course I'm not claiming that everyone throughout the country will be able to talk in Kazakh to a certain extent, but we will do our best."
President Nursultan Nazarbayev has also ordered that starting in 2010 all films to be shown in theatres with subtitles must have them in Kazakh. According to the Kazakhistan constitution the Kazakh language is the national language, and Russian remains an official language.
In actual numbers, increasing that number from 70% to 95% and allowing for population growth (1.2% per year, thus an extra 2 million over a decade) would mean an extra six million speakers of Kazakh over a decade, so from 11 million or so to about 17 million. Plus another 100,000 or so Kazakhs in Bayan-Ölgii in Mongolia, of course.
Read more...
From an article here in Turkish. Some of the info from the article:
Binbir Gece (Хиљаду и једна ноћ or Hiljadu i jedna noć in Serbian), one of the most popular shows within Turkey, is shown every night at 8:00 pm on Serbia's Fox television, with repeats on the weekend as well. The television drama with subtitles in Serbian has increased interest in Turkish and Turkey as well within the country. Music from Binbir Dece has found popularity among Serbian cell phone ringtones as well.
30,000 fans on Facebook.
A page for the show has also been started on the social networking site Facebook. On the page where followers of the show share their views on the development of the show now has over 30,000 members. (note: can't find a group of that size but here's one with 2,200 members in Serbian)
1.3 million viewers.
Fox television has become the most watched TV channel in the hour where Binbir Gece is broadcast. (Note: Serbia's total population is 7.3 million)
200,000 Serbian tourists to Turkey
An official from Turkey's Embassy in Belgrade said that in recent years relations between Serbia and Turkey have been very good, the results of which have been seen in tourism as well. According to him almost 200,000 Serbian tourists made their way to Turkey, and that they expected this to increase this year as well.
(Note: distance from Belgrade to Istanbul is 809 kilometres)
Here's another good site to bookmark if you are learning or know one of these languages, similar to Euronews in how articles are written in a number of languages (in this case four) and are also synchronized so it's easy to switch to the same article in another language. The article in the link (about being able to read web pages in Armenian on a cell phone) is actually only translated into three so clicking on the English link redirects you to the main page, but in other cases the article will be present in another language. This one for example is in English, Armenian and Russian but not Turkish.
Back in 2008 it was announced that Jonathan Aitken would be writing a biography on Nursultan Nazarbayev, the president of Kazakhstan. Apparently since then it has been published, and according to this article it has also been translated into Turkish. 301 pages in length, the Turkish title is "Kazakistan'ın Efsane Lideri Nazarbayev" (Nazarbayev, the legendary leader of Kazakhstan) and begins with his childhood in the Altay Mountains, eventually getting to a large part about him after being elected as Kazakhstan's first president. The article also says that this is Jonathan Aitken's 12th biography of a political leader.
While we're on the subject, Wikipedia in Turkish has a few spoken articles as well. You can see them all here, but those that might be particularly interesting for Page F30 readers are:
Tanrı'nın Şehri - City of God or De Civitate Dei, the book by Augustine.
Tanrı - God. Just like Persian has its own word for God separate from Allah (khodâ, خدا) so does Turkish that goes back to their common roots with Mongolia. See Tengriism in English for more on that.
Stargate Universe. I actually know nothing about Stargate but others certainly do.
El-Kanun fi't-Tıb or Canon Medicinae, the medieval book of medicine originally written by a Persian in Arabic and later translated into Latin and other languages.
Haçkar or Khachkar, the Armenian cross you can see there on the right.
Belarus will also be included in the full customs union between Russia and Kazakhstan slated to start on 1 July 2010.
Belarus' Economic Minister Nikolay Snopkov said that they would sign the agreements on the customs codes that were to go into effect on 1 July. Of the CIS states formed after the fall of the Soviet Union, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Moldova have also expressed an interest.
Snopkov said in a statement that Belarus President Aleksander Lukashenko and Russian First Deputy Prime Minister Igor Shuvalov had compromised on controversial issues, which include customs duties on foreign cars and airplanes.
According to Russian Economic Minister Elvira Nabuillina, trade volume between Russia and Belarus in 2009 had dropped by 31 percent, but had increased by 17 percent during the first quarter of 2010, and that half of Belarusian exports were to Russia.
There are probably two reasons why a pan-Turkic auxiliary language hasn't been created:
1) Independent and stable Turkic-speaking countries are a relatively recent phenomenon in modern times. Incorporation in the Soviet Union, very short periods of independence etc. didn't bode well for the fostering of a pan-Turkic language, and 2) Turkey has a much, much larger population and cultural influence than the rest of the Turkic languages put together. Compared to this, Slavic and Romance languages in particular are on a much more equal footing.
But let's say a pan-Turkic language were to be created. The general concept behind these types of languages is that they should be 1) immediately comprehensible to native speakers of the source languages, but also 2) fairly easy for others to learn as well. They would also rely on vocabulary common to as many of these languages as possible. Siberian Turkic languages would have to be removed from this as they are very different from the others...except for perhaps the odd time when reference to one could serve to break a stalemate over which word to use. Persian could also be referenced from time to time given the vocabulary they share. Grammar would probably resemble a mix between Turkish and Uzbek, and since the latter has no vowel harmony that could be taken out of the pan-Turkic IAL as well.
So here's a quick and very incomplete overview (basically thinking out loud) what one might look like. It's a pretty bare outline but if anyone has any questions I'll be happy to do some more thinking out loud and perhaps fill it out a bit.
First of all, pronouns are pretty easy:
men - I sen - you on - he/she/it biz - we siz - you (plural/polite) onlar - they
Plural would always be -lar, as in Uzbek.
A lot of Turkish words with v would become b as this is seen often in Turkic languages and b is easier to pronounce for most than v. Var thus becomes bar.
Ready for the first sentence? Here it is:
Bu yerda su bar mi? - Is there water here? In Turkish this is burada su var mı? Burada (here) is bu yerdä / bu yärdá / bū yerde in Uzbek/Uyghur/Turkmen, and using a construction with yer (place) makes it easier to understand as it literally means "in this place".
Da means in. Now we're on that subject, let's look at the other cases.
ni - accusative da - locative ga - dative (showing movement towards) dan - "from"
i vs. ni will be explained in a bit, but first let's show how to show possession. In Turkish you can indicate it with just a suffix, or with a pronoun plus the suffix, so it's redundant. In this IAL it would probably be either or. For example:
Turkish araba + m = arabam, but ben + im also means mine, so benim arabam just means my car, and benim araba is wrong. In this language it would be:
my = menim (noun) or noun + im your = senin (noun) or noun + in his/her/its = onin (noun) or noun + i/si our = bizim (noun) or noun + imiz your = sizin (noun) or noun + iniz their = onlarin (noun) or noun + ilar / silar
Some examples:
dost = friend
dostim or menim dost = my friend Onin dost bar mi? - does he/she/it have a friend? Dostiniz yok. - You don't have a friend. Sizin dost yok. - You don't have a friend. Dostlarinizga ket - (imperative) go to your friends. To go might be getmek or ketmek, not sure. The i/si there depends on whether it ends with a vowel or not. Araba (car) would then become arabasi (his/her/its car).
Examples of the accusative mentioned above:
Bu yerda su bar. - There is water here. Bu yerda dost bar. - There is a friend here. Menga suni ber. - Give me water. Menga sunizni ber. - Give me your water. Onga dosti ber. - Give him/her/it a friend. Onga dostinni ber. - Give him/her/it your friend.
Present tense would be the verb minus -mek and then the following endings added:
-irim -irin -ir -iriz -iriniz -irlar
So ketmek (or getmek), to go, would be:
getirim - I go, getirin, you go, getir - he/she/it goes, etc.
So "they are going" is getiyorlar. Dostlarimiz getiyorlar mi? - Are our friends going?
Future tense would be a bit different from these (pretty much just vowel harmony-free Turkish) as Turkish has the acak/ecek suffix where the k turns into ğ (unpronounced, just lengthens the preceding vowel) and an IAL shouldn't have that complication. Luckily Uzbek has a nice system so it would look like this:
-aman -asan -adi -amiz -asiz -adilar
Nice and easy. So Dostlari getadilar means "their friends will go". Okulima getasan? - Will you go to my school?
This word for school (okul, same as Turkish) shows where a lot of difficulty might be in this language, as the word for school in other Turkic languages sounds like the Turkish word for letter (a letter you send through the mail), mektup, and okul is a more 'international' word. The biggest area of contention might end up being whether this is a Turkic-based international language, or a pure Turkic constructed language.
Turkish President Abdullah Gül is in Kazakhstan today and the two leaders of their respective companies opened a few new buildings at Ahmet Yesevi University. This article has some information worth translating on these two Turkic-speaking countries, so here it is.
Kazakhstan President Nursultan Nazarbayev said that "Turkey and Kazakhstan are brothers with a single origin" at a press conference, after welcoming President Abdullah Gül to the presidential palace.
Regarding the opening of the new departments of Hoca Ahmet Yesevi University, Nazarbayev said "We opened the new department of this university together. This is an important university, opened under the initiative of Kazakhstan and Turkey, where over 20,000 students study. Here we have not only Kazakh and Turkish students, but students from over 20 Turkic countries as well."
(Note: that doesn't mean 20 independent countries, but both countries and autonomous regions such as Gagauzia, Tatarstan, etc.)
Nazarbayev mentioned that trade between the two countries had dropped slightly as a result of the worldwide economic crisis, but said that "In spite of these negatives we have a trade volume of 3 billion dollars between Turkey and Kazakhstan, which we hope to increase to 10 billion."
(No mention of the time frame for this)
Nazarbayev said that the businesspeople that had come to Kazakhstan with President Abdullah Gül had signed $300 million worth of short-term economic protocols, and that "These negotiations will end up with a total value of $1 billion, which is the most concrete benefit of this visit."
The university mentioned in the article is this one, the home page of which is in Turkish, Kazakh, English, and Russian.
Here's an article in Turkish from eight days ago, on how the Ministry of Education in Turkey has added Arabic to the list of languages that can be learned in schools. Part of the article:
The Ministry of Education has added Arabic to the list of foreign languages to be learned in schools after the removal of travel visas between Turkey and its neighboring countries. Right now the foreign languages that can be selected in schools are English, French, German, Italian, Chinese, Spanish, Japanese and Russian, to which Arabic has now been added.
Since a cabinet decision is needed in order for a language to be taught in schools, the Ministry of Education made a request to the cabinet on the 24th of March, which it then approved on 8 April. The decision of the cabinet went into effect yesterday with an issuance in the Official Gazette (Resmi Gazete).
