Saturday, May 26, 2007

The Language of Suffixes and Infixes...


So this is one of the longest words in Turkish. I've run into a few in the 25-30 letter range in the book I'm reading right now, but this one definitely beats them all! I've included an explanation (as far as I understand anyways) of each infix and suffix for the linguists out there (Tanya) or for anyone else who's curious...

Avrupalılaştıramadıklarımızdanmışsınız.

Apparently you are one of those we have not been able to Europeanize.

Avrupa—Europe

lı—suffix meaning 'with', 'connected to', 'containing' (with Europe>European)

laş—infix used in verbs to indicate that something is progressively becoming

tır—the infix used to show that something or someone is making someone or something to do something.

a—infix meaning ‘able’ but used only with negative, ('not able')

ma—infix used to indicate the negative form of a verb

dık—suffix used to make a verb into an adjective which describes its object (eg. 'myreading book' > 'the book that I read’)

lar—plural ending

ımız—person ending for ‘we’

dan—suffix meaning 'from' or 'of'

mış—suffix added to verbs to indicate that you did not see personally the verb taking place (in this word it means 'apparently')

sınız—person ending for ‘you’ plural or the formal/polite form of ‘you'

Good times with Turkish!

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Wow! I knew there was a reason I've always wanted to come to Turkey! Between the funky vowel harmony and the morphology... wow. Good times indeed!

cyrilla said...

came to your site because of negesti... wow! that's crazy! as a non-native speaker you would sure have to do alot of thinking as you go in order to catch all those morphemes!

Amy said...

It's really not as bad as it looks... remember, this is basically an entire sentence in Turkish, a complex one at that. Nobody starts with this! You just learn one piece at a time, slowly your brain forms new structures and bit-by-bit, they become automatic...well...mostly anyways