I know that the languages Turkish and Turkmen both belong to the Southern Turkic group of languages, but my question is how simlair are they and being a Turkish speaker of modest abilities how easy would it be for me to understand the written (that is using the modern latin turkish script) and spoken forms of Turkmen?
According to my handy-dandy Lonely Planet Central Asia phrasebook:
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Turkmen is normally seen in a Cyrillic-based alphabet. Roman and Arabic-based alphabets have some use, as well.
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There a few consonants in Turkmen that are not distinct phonemes in Turkish, notably an unvoiced uvular stop (cf. ‘Q’ in Arabic pronunciation of ‘Qatar’) and a voiced uvular fricative (cf. ‘r’ in French ‘rue’, ‘vrai’). Turkmen also has a lateralized ‘r’ phoneme (l-flavored) which is very close to the Japanese ‘r’ phoneme.
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Look at this page for a limited side-by-side view of some basic Turkish, Turkmen, and Uzbek words and expressions. While fundamental words like prepositions and color adjectives seem to have remained close between Turkish and Turkmen, Turkmen has borrowed significantly from Russian. This leads to more vocabulary differences between Turkish and Turkmen than one might expect.
Paging Collounsbury! Paging Tamerlane! Paging Jomo Mojo!
Meanwhile, you may be interested in this recent thread, to which our three esteemed colleagues have also contributed.
I was told that there was a high degree of mutual intelligibilty but looking at the differences in some of the key words I certainly would have trouble understanding it (though some of the differences in the chart seem to be brought about by different phrasing).
I was also told that the Turkmen government planned to go back to the Latin-Turkish script (the one used in the title) from Cyrillic script, has this happened?
The phrasebook I quoted was printed in 1998. There’s been time since then for sa small degree of change-over, but keep in mind that Cyrillic had been entrenched for over 70 years.
You’d really need to ask someone “on the ground” in Turkmenistan or a neighboring country.
We already answered the question in the other thread, AFAIC.
Türkmenistan is now officially using the Roman alphabet, beginning in 2001, IIRC. It uses the letter y for the high back unrounded vowel, which in Turkish is the noktasïz (dotless) i. So now Türkmen uses the letter ÿ for the consonantal y.
Türkmen language is in the same subfamily of Turkic languages as Turkish, Azerbaijani, and Gagauz. The Southwestern or Oguz group. However, while Azerbaijani is very close to Turkish (as much as 70% mutual comprehension according to one study), the resemblance with Türkmen is not so close.
‘Help me’ in Türkmen:
Mana kemek edin
‘Help me’ in Turkish:
Bana yardïm verin
(Literally, in both examples, ‘To me help give’. The only cognate in this example is the dative first person singular pronoun, mana/bana ‘to me’. The initial m- of most Turkic languages has changed to b- in Turkish. Compare Kyrgyz muz, Turkishbuz ‘ice’. Tatar meng, Turkish bin ‘thousand’.)
We can see from this example how mutual comprehensibility between Turkish and Türkmen would be probably rather limited.
Aaaah, thanks for that bit of info. I don’t have any references quite that recent.
Still, if the conversion to the Roman alphabet was mandated only two years ago, a good amount of Turkmen written material almost certainly still exists in the Cyrillic alphabet.
I’d disagree slightly with your literal translation slightly, the Turkish would translate as ‘(to me) (help) (you give)’ = ‘Bana yardim verin’ (with the ‘i’ in yardim having not having a dot)
One interesting difference I noticed on the comparision page is the Tukmen use of ‘yok’ (with dots above the y and o), which is very simlair to the Turkish ‘yok’ (without dots) which means ‘there is no’ (e.g. ‘su yok’ - ‘there is no water’).
In Turkish, yok means ‘it doesn’t exist’. It can be used to mean ‘no’. But it is a very abrupt sound, as subtle as a punch in the nose. The Turks are a very polite people and they prefer to use the softer word hayïr (from the Arabic word for ‘good’) to say ‘no’.
I think I made a mistake in a post above. ‘Help me’ in Turkish would actually be bana yardïm edin. Using the verb ‘do’ instead of ‘give’. Literally, ‘to me help do’. (Like Yoda, you the verb at the end of the sentence put.)
In Turkish and Türkmen, this very basic word ‘do’ is identical.
It’s more polite to use the second person polite form of the imperative verb, with the ending -in. But the plain way of saying it would be to use the simple verb stem as the imperative.
Turkish: Bana yardïm et.
Türkmen: Mana kemek et.
I’ve lived in Turkish Cyprus and I’ve never heard yok, used as ‘no’ (I’m not saying that I doubt it can be, I’ve just never heard it)
The suffix (i)n is informal, so to be polite you would use the suffix (i)niz, which is the personal ending for ‘Siz’ which serves exactly the same fuction as ‘vous’ does in French.
I think the infinitve is yardimak (‘i’ without the dot).