I’m off to Turkey and can’t wait to visit the spice bazaar. To help me understand what I’m seeing and eating I’ve begun adding a few Turkish words to the data base. The entire site hasn’t been coded to translate Turkish yet but the mobile version has been. I hope you get a chance to use this. I like it for quickly looking up words. I haven’t thoroughly reviewed all the Turkish entries so a few errors are likely. I should be able to fix these as I begin using the words or examining menus.
Taking pictures and eating good food are high on my list of things to do in Istanbul. After Istanbul we’ll be hiking and exploring Cappadocia.
To help pronounce the Turkish words properly I built a short table with the letters and sounds that may be different than what I would expect. If this works then I’ll clean it up, if it gets me into trouble then I’ll fix it.
Here is the table and notes.
Turkish Language Notes
Turkish uses a character set that is very similar to the Latin letters used in English. It does have 29 letters so there are a few differences. There are three letters that don’t exist in the Turkish alphabet but are included for foreign words; they are Q, X, and W.
The additional characters are Ç, Ğ, Ö, Ş, and Ü. There are also two variations of the letter I, one is dotted (İ) and the other an undotted (I). For a complete explanation there are many web sources available. To help with pronunciation here is a list of the letters that are significantly different from the English.
| Letter | Pronunciation | |
|---|---|---|
| Upper Case | Lower Case | |
| C | C | j as in job |
| Ç | ç | ch as in change |
| Ğ | ğ | Almost silent like gh in light |
| Ö | ö | i as in lid |
| J | j | zh as s in measure |
| Ş | ş | sh as in shop |
| Ü | ü | u as in tune |
| İ | i | ee as in meet |
| V | v | w as in why |
