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Comment by maeln | Hacker News Reader

Turkish is an amazing language. I have been learning it since my wife is Turk and it has been a pleasure. Everything is regular and well defined, even the way a word is constructed is defined by rule. Compared to my very irregular native language (French), it is a real pleasure.

I supposed, this makes it a much more simple language to do NLP than a lot of other language.

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The good thing about Turkish language besides its grammatical structure is the way you pronounce it. I am a very fluent English speaker (and have been living in the US for 8+ years now) and occasionally i am amazed at how some things pronounced compared to root of the words (though when you get the hang of it, you eventually develop an intuition as to why).

With Turkish, it's very trivial.

Well there are also a lot of exceptions in Turkish. Like "e". "Mert" and "Meyhane" have different "e"s. For many words, you just have to know how to pronounce them.

Actually, this is not an exception in Turkish. It is because of that "meyhane" is a foreign word (adapted from Persian). In any case, no one will expect smo to pronounce these 'e's distinguishably.

First of all, nobody will understand if you pronounce it "meːɐ̯t" (as in "mehr" in German + "t").

Mert is actually also a foreign word. Well, most (I'd guess 90%) of the words starting with "me" are of Arabic or Persian origin.

But the difference is there in Turkish words as well. Geri, gerzek (which is interestingly a shortcut for "geri zeka") and gevrek.

There are many "e"s in Turkish, difference among which is very sparsely documented.

Don't even get me started on the "ğ" (which is normally supposed to just make the previous vocal letter longer but took on many other roles).

We should probably say "okundugu gibi yazilan" instead of "yazildigi gibi okunan" :) That'll do.

For many words, you just have to know how to pronounce them.

Tell that to people of Samsun :)

All accents are beautiful :)

The difference between open e and close e(for lack of a better word) is not as important, however.

It is much easier, but still it is tricky because of exceptions like palatal / non palatal l, ambiguous a and u because we do not use the circumflex accent anymore, subtleties about soft g etc.

It's really fun to observe the generation that grew up without the circumflex accent. I have heard some bizarre pronunciations on Turkish TV particularly with the young reporters.

Maybe it'll be for the better, who knows. Languages evolve. I am curious how our pronunciation will sound to generations 100, 200, 500 years ahead.

I had the exact same thoughts.

I think what causes most people to stumble when learning Turkish is vocabulary - with romance languages and to some extent germanic ones, you can get away with a lot just because of similar word roots. With Turkish, a lot of people have to contend with entirely new words for pretty much everything. The rest is easy.

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