Why did the Turkish culture and language not spread?

It’s a joke, playing on the Byzantine as in Byzantine Empire, and “byzantine” as overly complicated.

Oh, dear, you want me to explain a pun? OK, I’ll go for it. Look up the definition of the word Byzantine: Merriam Webster’s, for instance. 1. something related to Byzantium (former name of Constantinople, today’s Istanbul, Turkey, wink, wink) or [definitions 2 and 3 are irrelevant in this case] or 4.a “of, or related to, or characterized by devious and usually surreptitous manner of operation” or 4.b “intricately involved: labyrinthine” (as the Turkish language can be)

Because Turkish is agglutinative, which is friggin’ hard to learn.

I kinda like the sound of it though. I don’t understand anything, but it sounds happy, in the same way Korean does. At least to my ears.

That’s why?

I wouldn’t take “technical difficulty” too seriously. Language competency is driven mostly by need, not ease of learning. If Turkish were required to conduct business, people would learn it. Look at English, which is so irregular and inconsistent it’s probably actually harder to learn than any agglutinative language, but it’s also #1 most popular language in the world if you include second-language speakers. Which is a good measure of how “necessary” a language is: how many people speak it as a non-native language? Because that’s a direct measure of the functional necessity of the language.

Ottoman or Osmanli Turkish, which was functionally a distinct court language not intelligible to most rural Turkish speakers. As with many things having to deal with Ottoman court culture, it was a highly cosmopolitan mix of Turkish, Persian and Arabic (mostly via Persian).

It’s not “the holy language of Arabic”; it’s called Ottoman Turkish

which did have up to 88% of its vocabulary influenced by Arabic and Turkish.

After the foundation of the Republic of Turkey there were deliberate reforms to replace the alphabet/script and to Turkify the vocabulary.

Turkish is pretty easy to learn. Just repeat after me as we learn three new words in Turkish: “towel” … “bath” … “border” …

Very interesting. Hungarian is also an agglutinative language, which I guessed since Finnish was mentioned in your quote.

Curiously, the proto Hungarian people were also thought to have originated near Siberia. Agglutinative languages are common to that area for some reason?

Also, “difficult for English speakers to learn” is not the same as “difficult for anybody to learn.”

Funny😊

Ok, I looked up agglutinative

I hate that meaning.
So I looked up agglutination
“The act of agglutinating”
Come on Merriam, we must do better!

Some obscure meaning that says "yada, yada…something to do with words spoken…yakkity, yakkity. And something to do with blood particles sticking together.

I wanna know how it sounds.
Someone describe it, please.

(God, I hope it means gutteral)

I think you’re forgetting France’s former African colonies. French is the sole official language of several African nations: Côte d’Ivoire (pop. 29,344,847) Gabon, (2,397,368) and Benin (13,754,688) for example. It’s also an official language in Cameroon (30,135,732), Rwanda (13,400,541) and Burundi (13,162,952). May not be 1st language in those countries, but certainly second language.

From Wikipedia:

Yeah, I saw that. Tells me nothing.

ETA: oh wait. I think I get it now. It’s not a sound but a way of saying a word that explains a big idea. Stringing the morphemes together. Yay!

Right. English is a synthetic language and doesn’t merge sounds that way to make new words. We rely on pronouns and prepositions, as separate words: « From » (preposition); « your » (pronoun); « houses » (noun), to give the same example but in English.

So proud of the Dopers.
:blush:.
My ignorance been fought twice today!!

I just say “Lego language” to those unfamiliar. You build up words like lego bricks.

Inuit languages are agglutinative. I’ve read somewhere that one of the marks of experience and wisdom is that young people tend to use short words, while elders tend to use longer words, building more qualifications and explanatory bits into the longer word.

Only 23% of the people in Switzerland speak French as their first language. The primary language of Switzerland is German (Swiss German or standard German).

Languages of Switzerland

In Belgium, Dutch is the primary language, then French. Languages of Belgium.

Of course, this means that French as a second language is very popular in both Switzerland and Belgium.

Considering how many native Turkish speakers there are, it is rather surprising to see how few there are in Switzerland, compared to other languages which has far fewer native speakers.

For example, Switzerland has more native Albanian speakers (approximately 7 million native speakers worldwide) compared to the number of native Turkish speakers (82 million native speakers worldwide. Perhaps Turkey is (was?) stable enough that people just want to stay there.