[makmanalp]

The thing about Turkish is that the grammar is very forgiving to mistakes while preserving meaning: word order can be leveraged for subtle emphasis but pretty much doesn't matter for general meaning. Conjugations are pretty much always standard. There is a "correct" ordering for the suffixes but the meaning is generally obvious even without them. If you mess up the vowel harmony it just sounds odd but again the meaning is clear. You can often omit articles because the suffixes mirror them. It's also a phonetic language - there's no "sounds different at the end of the word" etc.

It's really the perfect language to pick up on a visit even ... except the vocabulary doesn't resemble anything that most of the rest of the world speaks. There's lots of loanwords from farsi, arabic, french and english of course but beyond that and speakers of other Turkic languages, it's struggle for most people.

But yes, it's true that we're often over the moon that someone put in the effort to speak it :-)

[rjh29]

It's scarily similar to Japanese in a lot of ways. Both are agglutinative languages.

[mmasu]

yes, when i was living in turkey and started learning turkish this is the thing that most impressed me. High similarity to Korean also.

[brnt]

Well, considering where Turkish (Turkic?) comes from, perhaps not a coincidence?

[indigo945]

This not being a coincidence is the Altaic Family Hypothesis, which posits that Turkic, Mongolic and often also Japonic and/or Korean languages form a superfamily, sharing a common ancestor. The hypothesis is mostly discredited by present-day linguistics.

[brnt]

Is that the only explanation though? Could proximity explain things? It is my private theory that German and Polish having had so much geographic overlap explains some common features, despite being from different families.

[indigo945]

I don't know to what extent this has happened with German and Polish. They are, of course, (somewhat distant) cousins in any case, both being Indo-European languages.

But it is often the case that geographically close languages influence each other -- the term in linguistics is "sprachbund". If one is entirely honest, a lot of languages have taken vocabulary or grammatical features from one or more languages from other language families, rendering the entire idea of a language "family" (the word is here evoked to imply a pure genetic lineage) kind of suspect to begin with. But it still is how linguistics is commonly done today.

[bloppe]

German and Polish share a common ancestor.

[mmasu]

indeed; but still incredible that it retained so many characteristics over time and at such great distance from origin! I had been very fascinated with this.

[foobarian]

Going the other way around, coming from a Slavic language I was really surprised at how many Turkish words we have. I didn't realize this until watching the show Diriliş: Ertuğrul, and doing a double take every other line. "Why are there so many Serbo-Croat words in there???"

The "error tolerance" you mention is interesting, especially in contrast with Mandarin. My understanding is that messing up the intonation there can completely alter the meaning of words, leading to trope situations where the foreigner says something embarrassing and all the native speakers laugh.

[MichaelZuo]

It’s even worse for Cantonese, at least from what I noticed when travelling in HK. Where speakers are pretty much forced to shout out every single word when there’s any background noise whatsoever. (or get very close to their interlocutor’s ears, practically lips touching earlobes)

[techcode]

AFAIK very few "Serbo-Croatian" words got adopted by Turkish/Ottoman - I only know of "kraljica".

On the other hand - during ~500 years (within last ~625 years) that Ottomans occupied most of Balkans - many words stuck around to this day.

For example: Jok, Jorgan, Džezva, Mašala ...etc

[foobarian]

The ones that susprised me were more common things: kutija, čelik, sat, čoban, boja, budala, sanduk, pare...

Hah, of course wiki has a pretty good list with even more: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Serbo-Croatian_words_o...

[makmanalp]

> budala

:-)

[egeozcan]

A tourist who can speak a few sentences in Turkish could get a lot of free stuff in small shops when I used to live in Istanbul. My "cute" French didn't have the same effect in Paris though.

[anticensor]

Turkish doesn't have articles, I think you meant determiner adjectives there.