Chapter 39 - Spelling and punctuation

Summary

The most recent Turkish alphabet and the writing conventions were adopted in late 1920s, which is pretty recent. Therefore, Turkish spelling is very regular and predictable. Each alphabet character represents a phoneme in a word's spelling, although there are some exceptions to this generalization.

Long and short vowels

Long vowels are not indicated in writing because Turkish does not have long vowel alphabet characters. They used to be spelled with a circumflex accent (^) in the past, but it is no longer used. You may still see such spellings in older or more traditional texts. Here are some examples, where the first vowel of the word is long. In the last two examples, the final vowels are long too.

1. mali ‘financial’

2. lazım ‘necessary’

3. galiba ‘perhaps’

4. hala ‘still’

You need to learn whether words have long vowels or not.

Fronted vowels

Fronted vowels in mostly Persian borrowings and borrowings from other languages are not marked in any way, so, you need to learn these too.