Talk:Turkmen language

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Turkmen does not use the Cyrillic alphabet any longer. olivier 10:58, 6 Sep 2003 (UTC)

Contents

[edit] Latin script

Several questions about the Turkmen Latin script:

  1. Does anyone know how well the introduction of Turkmen Latin script goes on there? Is it taught in schools, or is there still a mix of Cyrillic and Latin? Are there any adult people who use it?
  2. In what language are newspapers printed? Street signs? Government documents and passports?
  3. Who designed it? It seems very weird in comparison to other Turkic Latin scripts. Where Turkish and Azeri use dotless i, Turkmen uses y, like Polish, and where Turkish uses y it uses y-acute. If the purpose of Latinization was to bring the Turkmen culture closer to Turkish, then it missed the point entirely. It actually looks so stupid, that it makes me think that the Great Serdar Saparmurad Turkmenbashi designed it himself.
  4. What does the exiled Turkmen opposition think about the script? I see that some opposition websites use Cyrillic and some use Turkmenbashi's weird Latin, even though they hate Turkmenbashi. Are there any proposals to make yet another reform that will make Turkmen look like Turkish and Azeri?--Amir E. Aharoni 12:35, 29 October 2005 (UTC)


Everything is in Latin script there, it's illegal to publish or print anything in the Turkmen language using Cyrillic in Turkmenistan. It was designed by a national committee of linguists. The older people have the most trouble adapting, many became functionally illiterate and were forced to learn the new script or lose their jobs. It is taught in all Turkmen Language Schools (more than 95% of schools in the country). The purpose was not to bring Turkmen language close to Turkish, but instead to reinforce a nationalistic sense of Turkmen identity. BP

[edit] Measure of Closeness

It is a southern Turkic language, in the Turkmenian group, closely related to Crimean Tatar and Salar, and less closely related to Turkish and Azerbaijani.

What is the metric of closeness used here? I speak Turkish; I took a look at the Turkmen resources at http://www.chaihana.com/lang.html. Not only that the language is pretty close to Istanbul Turkish, I would think that it is pretty much the same thing with Azeri language. This makes me think that Turkmen and Tatar languages should be identical. -AverageTurkishJoe 02:29, 27 February 2006 (UTC)

Perhaps take a look in http://www.ethnologue.com/show_family.asp?subid=90026 --Hello World! 16:13, 27 April 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Wikipedia interlanguage link title is wrong

Now the link title on the left side shows up as

تركمن / Туркмен

There are at least 2 things not OK:

  1. The Cyrillic spelling should be Түркмен with the special letter ү for ü (this spelling is given in the article).
  2. The main script for Turkmen is Latin now, so it should be there in the link title.

Where to report this issue? (Also posted to Wikipedia talk:Interlanguage links#Where to report a problem with interlang. link title (Turkmen)?.) --Imz 23:38, 8 May 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Names?

Why do Turkmen names sound so Slavic? The Russianized name of the new acting president looks suspiciously similar to his Turkmen name. Does Turkmen use the same sort of suffix system for names as many Slavic languages do? —pfahlstrom 22:19, 8 January 2007 (UTC)

It is a result of the Soviet era. They were under a "Slavization" project. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 139.179.207.202 (talk) 15:55, 9 December 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Initial caps

Twice today I've reverted reversions of the Turkmen name for the Turkmen language from the Turkmen correct usage, which is not to capitalize language names, back to the original English usage. I pointed out the proper usage as demonstrated on the Turkmen version of the page, and someone else pointed out the Korean version in comparison. I wasn't talking about the way the name was written at the top of the Turkmen version, in the initial exposition on the language—which tells us nothing about Turkmen capitalization of language names, because it's the first word in each sentence where it's used, so its capitalized for that reason. I was talking about forms of the word (Turkmen has agglutination, so most uses of the word have suffixes at the end) that appear within sentences later in the body of the Turkmen page. These uses are not capitalized. —Largo Plazo 14:54, 12 January 2007 (UTC)

You misunderstood. I meant that you should take a look at the articles on the Korean and Russian languages in the Turkmen Wikipedia. Have a look. And the problem is, even if it is not capitalized in the middle of the sentence, it still doesn't make sense: We are talking about after a colon, which in the English language means that the word after will be capitalized. That's all. I am still waiting for another argument before I revert again. Baristarim 15:08, 12 January 2007 (UTC)
I don't think replicating other people's mistakes, no matter how pervasive they are, is the appropriate strategy for maintaining Wikipedia. Also, you're incorrect about the rule about caps after colons. The letter after a colon is capitalized only if it would have been a cap in the absence of the colon and the part of the sentence that precedes it—for example, if what the colon introduces is a whole sentence. In that case, the letter after the colon is capitalized because it's sentence-initial, not because it comes after a colon.
The following text is one sentence:

Turkmen (Latin script: türkmen, Cyrillic: түркмен, ISO 639-1: tk, ISO 639-2: tuk) is the name of the national language of Turkmenistan.

The words "türkmen" and "түркмен" aren't sentences here, they're just values in the parenthetical list of name/value pairs. Since they aren't sentence-initial, they shouldn't be capitalized on that account, and since they're meant to demonstrate normal Turkmen orthography, and Turkmen doesn't capitalize language names, they don't call for capitalization on that account. —Largo Plazo 15:19, 12 January 2007 (UTC)
Are you sure? Because I saw many capitalizations in the Turkmen Wikipedia, that's why I gave the examples of the entries for the Korean and Russian languages of Turkmen Wikipedia. Baristarim 15:21, 12 January 2007 (UTC)
The three instances of the word for "Turkmen" in the article on the Turkmen language in Turkmen Wikipedia that aren't at the beginning of a sentence are türkmen, türkmenleriň, and türkmeniň. Yes, I'm sure I see no capital letters in them.—Largo Plazo 20:25, 12 January 2007 (UTC)
Okkkay... Listen, you still didn't get it. That article is particularly badly written, I meant in general and in other articles. I understand Turkmen, I took a look at other articles and most articles use caps for the first letter of countries and languages in them. This is the official website of the government of Turkmenistan [1] and I can see "Туркменистана" capitalized. I will revert soon, this is still not making sense at all. In many articles in the Turkmen Wikipedia language names are capped ni the middle of the sentences, especially after colons. Are you making serious research before making these claims?? Baristarim 07:47, 13 January 2007 (UTC)
If I'm still not getting it, it's because you haven't been communicating it clearly (such as by telling me to look at the Turkmen page again, which I did and found that it demonstrated, as I showed you, what I'd been saying, not what you'd been saying, so it isn't clear to me what you expected me to find there in support of your claim) and because you've been supporting your claim with irrelevancies like what was done on the Korean and Russian versions of the page (as though what one unknown Korean or Russian knows about Turkmen is authoritative). You haven't provided any information that is clear and also conclusive. Maybe you know the rule because you have learned the rules of formal Turkmen writing. But you didn't say that. Instead you gave the impression that you were inferring it from the usage found on some other Wikipedia pages.
The name of the country is a separate issue. To the best of my knowledge, all languages that have capitalization capitalize country names, whether or not they capitalize the names of nationalities or the names of language. In every Romance language, for example, country names are capitalized, while adjectives of nationality and names of languages are not. So telling me that "Туркменистана" is capitalized on the Turkmen government website is both stating the obvious and irrelevant to Turkmen treatment of names of languages.
If you tell me that language names in "many" articles in Turkmen Wikipedia are capitalized, that implies that in many, perhaps even most, they aren't. So that doesn't settle the question—though it does show that I was hasty in treating the Turkmen Wikipedia article on Turkmen as authoritative. If you tell me that those capitalizations occur "especially" after colons, it tells me nothing since you didn't mention whether those colons are introducing complete sentences, and because some of the writers may have the same misunderstanding as you did.
The bottom line is that even if Turkmen does capitalize language names, the evidence you'd presented before now has been either irrelevant or inconclusive. Since you understand Turkmen, did you study the rules of writing it? If so, and if you know factually from your studies or your reading that language names are capitalized, I would have believed you right off if you'd simply said so. That would have had much more value than citing everything you've noted about what's on this or that Wikipedia page written in language X by random unknown people whose usage among themselves is inconsistent! —Largo Plazo 12:18, 13 January 2007 (UTC)