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Türkmen Language

1.6 Long and Short Vowels

Another interesting feature of Turkmen is the use of long and short vowels. Short vowels are like those in English, like the a in "bar." Long vowels simply require pronouncing

short vowels for the duration of two vowels. Often this difference in duration is all that distinguishes the meanings of two words, as in the pairs below:

1.7 Vocal Transformations

Certain consonant combinations are rendered differently in spoken Turkmen than their written forms would indicate. For example, the nd of mende (on my person) is pronounced "nn" when spoken (menne). The following chart will illustrate these combinations and examples with the spoken transformations rendered in the new alphabet.:

 2.0 The Case System

Like Russian or German, Turkic languages have a system of grammatical cases. Cases are defined by changes that occur to a word when it is placed in different grammatical context. English has cases for personal prounouns. For example: "I see him", "He sees me". Not: "Me sees he", "Him sees I". Turkmen, however, has six cases, and these cases are used for all words, not just personal prounouns. The six Turkmen cases are: the nominative, used for the subject of the sentence; the possessive, similar to English possessives; the dative, used to show directed action; the accusative, which is similar to the English "direct object"; the time/place, which shows locality; and the instrumental, which is used to show origin.

While six cases might seem a bit overwhelming at first, it should be noted that the case suffixes simply replace our English prepositions such as "from," "at," "with," "in," "on," and "to". Also, the rules for their use are remarkably simple and inflexible, unlike those of the Russian cases.

2.1 Cases of Pronouns

These follow fairly straightforwardly from the regular case endings. The only unusual exceptions being the mutation of ol to on in all cases, and the dative pronouns maňa, saňa, and oňa.

"Note: This Turkmen Grammar is Copyrighted © 1996 Jon Garrett, Meena Pallipamu, and Greg Lastowka. All rights are reserved. The full dictionary is available at www.chaihana.com."

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