Author: Aylin D. Miller

Is Turkish really the best natural/non-artifical language out there, and if yes, why?

Former English lecturer at Bilkent University Robin Turner answers this question on Quora:

It’s a point of dogma among linguists that no natural language is superior to another. Personally I think this is just dogma, but it’s probably true that there is no such thing as the best language overall for the simple reason that languages have to balance a number of different and often contradictory things. A language with a very large vocabulary will likely be more expressive, but will be harder to learn. Using tones multiplies the available vocabulary while limiting the use of intonation to express emotion. Isolating languages (where words do not have different grammatical forms) have simple grammar at the expense of relatively inflexible word order (except for Chinese, which is an isolating language that also has fairly flexible word order, but it does this at the cost of ambiguity).

Having said this, we can say Turkish has some advantages.

1. It’s agglutinating (“stick things on the end of words”) grammar is almost completely regular and very easy to learn. Learning a new grammatical feature is usually just a case of learning which suffix you need to add to the verb, and you can put your new knowledge into practice immediately.
2. Related to this, you can play around with word order with little danger of ambiguity. In English, fronting (moving a word to the beginning of a sentence to emphasise it) is very limited (e.g., “That I could go for”) but in Turkish, like Latin, you can do it as much as you like. You can also move the question word ma/mi around to show what you are questioning (Ali geldi mi? = “Did Ali come?” Ali mi geldi? = “Was it Ali that came?”).
3. It has no gender, articles or other ways of making nouns a nightmare. It does have case, but once you’ve sat down and drilled yourself in it, it’s easy – it’s not like Latin where you have different declensions.
4. Because Turkish adopted the Latin alphabet late, it is written almost exactly as pronounced (there are a few exceptions where the written form doesn’t properly represent contractions, like ağabey or yapayım).
5. The language reforms of the mid-twentieth century got rid of a slew of Arabic and Persian loanwords, sometimes replacing them with (usually) logical Turkish neologisms. This created a smaller and more consistent vocabulary.

But of course, these can be also construed as disadvantages. The grammar means that you have to keep your ears open to catch the suffix that tells you if a sentence is negative (and by the time the speaker gets to the verb, someone will probably have interrupted them). Losing all those loanwords was seen as a tragedy by many. Writing phonetically makes it more likely that people speaking different dialects will “misspell” words, and so on.

I love Turkish, but I can’t claim that it is objectively superior to other languages, just better for some people if they like the kind of features that Turkish has. It’s like Malcolm Gladwell said, “There is no such thing as the perfect Pepsi. There are only perfect … Pepsis.¹”

1. Choice, happiness and spaghetti sauce | Malcolm Gladwell ↩︎