By Hilary Picken | February 28, 2019 | Languages
Turkish often extends words to add more detail to their meaning, or to change it, as happens in English when possible is modified to impossible. The result is that a typical Turkish word is often significantly longer than its English counterpart – but its English counterpart might really be multiple words. For example, masmavi doesn’t just mean blue, it specifically means bright blue, and is a compound of the word for bright and the word for blue.
However, the length of a Turkish word to which this process has been applied can be markedly longer than that, with a choice example coming in the sentence Dilde birlik, ulusal birliğin vazgeçilemezlerindendir.
This sentence as a whole says that a united language is required for a united culture; the final word, around half the total number of characters, would roughly mean ‘impossible to do without’, not what you would expect to see at the end of an English sentence with the same overall meaning.
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