Customer Reviews

Turkish (Descriptive Grammars)

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Anyone contemplating purchasing this book, especially given the extradordinarily high price, should be well aware of what it is and, most particularly, what it is not: It is essentially a detailed, filled out "questionaire" applied to a series of languages to produce "grammars" for comparative purposes; this volume deals with the Turkish-related responses to the questionaire. It is thus intended to enable professional "linguists" (i.e, not polyglots but rather practitioners of modern theoretical linguistics) to compare and contrast various aspects of languages from widely differing families.

It is emphatically not intended to help a person learn to speak, read, or understand Turkish, and will prove of little help to someone with such goals. In fact, despite its volume, it in fact is rather thin in terms of the information it provides. Although it has an index, looking up grammatical points in it will be difficult for most people, and the information imparted is usually quite limited. Ms. Kornfilt may indeed have a good knowledge of Turkish, but this book is aimed at a very narrow audience with very specialized interests, which in almost all cases deal with issues of comparative linguistic structures rather than the Turkish language per se. This is not a criticism of the book, but merely a warning so that the potential purchaser knows what he/she will get.

Intermediate to advanced students of the Turkish language seeking a detailed reference grammer intended to explain the fine points of the language should give careful consideration to the excellent "Turkish Grammar" of Geoffrey Lewis, also available thorugh Amazon. While also expensive, it costs only a quarter of what this book does, and will be much more useful for the average person.

I borrowed this book and probably cannot afford to buy it as I had planned to, but it is a very good book for someone who has already learned Turkish. I learned Turkish in Turkey speaking it and have big gaps in my knowledge, especially of complicated sentence construction. I did not read all of the technical linguistic descriptions in the book but instead read all of the examples, and learned a bunch. It also helped me translate some Ottoman passages into English.
Kornfilt gives constructions in gradients of possibility. Sentences offered are marked as accepted by all/most/some/few/no speakers, and for many unacceptable constructions she offers logical explanations for why they are unacceptable. The back of the book has an extensive food and cooking glossary I enjoyed very much. The family relationship glossary was unfortunately missing some colloquial words, and there were some typos in the second half of the book, but these never affected the meaning of the lesson being taught, and overall I wish I had never returned the book to the library which is (alas) far away in a school from which I recently graduated.

Jaklin Kornfilt is the most influencial linguist whose work particularly focuses on Turkish. The book covers morphology, syntax and the phonology of the language. Turkish morphosyntax dominates the bulk of the book, leaving very little focus on the phonetic and phonological structure of the language, probably due to the fact that Kornfilt is a syntactician. In general, the topics are, for the most part, covered in light of the recent developments in the linguistic theory. The treatment of the Turkish copular system is very interesting but a little confusing at the same time. All in all, I find this work very satisfactory and useful especially as a reference book for those who are interested in Turkish.

It is unneccessarily long and very [pricey] for an ordinary reader. It contains lots of repetitions. It could have been much shorter. I don't think it is worth [$]!!