Wednesday, 28 February 2007

Introduction to Sentence

Turkish sentence has a free form, ie the places of words can change without breaking the structure. Let's see an example:

Sam loves Juddy.
Juddy loves Sam.

These two sentences have different meanings since the word orders are different. The word before the verb is the subject and the other one coming after the verb is the object. In Turkish, the identifier of the function of a member of the sentence is not the place of that member in the sentence. Every word is inflected according to it's function in the sentence.

We will see the cases of words ie suffixes a word can take later, but now I will translate the two sentences above into Turkish:

Sam loves Juddy : Sam Juddy'i seviyor.

As you guess, seviyor means loves. It is inflected according to the time and the owner of the action and we won't look at it deeply now. At the moment, our focus is on the sentence. Let's look at these rewrites of our sentence:

Sam Juddy'i seviyor.
Sam seviyor Juddy'i.
Juddy'i Sam seviyor.
Juddy'i seviyor Sam.
Seviyor Juddy'i Sam.
Seviyor Sam Juddy'i.

All of these have the same meaning: Sam loves Juddy. But there is a little difference of emphasis and we will talk about emphasis again later.

The only thing we should learn from this title is summarized in this one sentence:
In Turkish, the function of the words is determined by suffixes and the places of words in the sentence may freely change to alter the emphasis of the sentence.

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