# Accent



## modus.irrealis

Hi,

I had some questions about the placement of the accent in certain Turkish words because the sources I'm learning from sometimes give conflicting information.

I understand that there are some suffixes that carry the accent and some that don't, but for the ones that do and are more than one syllable long which syllable of the suffix is stressed? For example, do you say _gelécek_ or _gelecék_?

About _-yor_, does it carry the accent or does it force it to be on the previous syllable? For example, do you say _gelíyorum_ or _geliyórum_, or can you say either?

And finally, about _-ler_, does it always have the accent? Would you say _yorgúndurlar_ or _yorgundurlár_, or something else altogether?

Thanks.


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## Chazzwozzer

Hi,

With a few exceptions, accent is _always _on the last syllable. All of the examples you've given are regular, so;

*gelecé**k
geliyor*_*ú*_*m
*_*yorgundurl*_*á*_*r

*_Note that these three are perfectly Turkic.





			
				modus.irrealis said:
			
		

> About _-yor_, does it carry the accent or does it force it to be on the previous syllable?


_-yor_ carries the accent, if it's the last syllable. The suffixes that force the accent to be on the previous syllable are: _-ce, -le, -me/-ma, -se/-sa, -im/-sin

_


			
				modus.irrealis said:
			
		

> And finally, about _-ler_, does it always have the accent?


_-ler _isn't different either. The same rule goes for it. If it's the last syllable, it has the accent. Of course, if the word is not loan or a name of a place! 
e.g. *Úşaktakiler *(those who are in Uşak) and *Uşakl**ár *(manservants)


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## modus.irrealis

Thanks Chazzwozzer. That was very clear.


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## Spectre scolaire

Stress in Turkish is an extrememly delicate subject, and I don’t think there is any comprehensive treatment about it in the literature. The problem is that whereas certain words in certain positions _do_ have an “accent”, and this can sometimes be fixed with some degree of certainty – especially some verbal forms like gelemém, “I can’t come” – it should be said that Turkish stress is rather applied in a larger context than the word. This is probably why “intensity accent” is a better word to describe “accent” in Turkish. 

I dont agree with _Chazzwozzer_ that “accent is _always_on the last syllable”. Nor do I agree with his exemples to prove this. And his exemple _Úşaktakiler_ is not a good one to prove the opposite. If you ask a Hungarian to pronounce this word, you will hear how it sounds like in a language where _all_ words have an accent on the first syllable – and quite a clearly recognizable one at that! A native Turk would find such a pronounciation of Uşaktakiler bizarre. Then the question arises: What is the diffrence between a Turk and a Hungarian pronouncing Uşaktakiler?! –according to _Chazzwozzer_’s indications of the first. 

My suggestion when it comes to Turkish stress patterns is to listen to how Frenchmen are coping with the same topic. There is no “accent” in French (like there is in Italian), but there is definitely some sort of _intensity accent_ which is “roaming about” on the sentence level and which requires quite some time to master – not unlike the same phenomenon in Turkish! 

So perhaps a learner of Turkish should not pay to much attention to accent at all - otherwise than try and emulate speech à la française...


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## Chazzwozzer

Spectre scolaire said:


> I dont agree with _Chazzwozzer_ that “accent is _always_on the last syllable”. Nor do I agree with his exemples to prove this.


Please quote as I exactly said;* "With a few exceptions,..."*
They were not my examples, but modus.irrealis' question. If you think the answer I provided is wrong, then why not tell me the "correct" way?



Spectre scolaire said:


> And his exemple _Úşaktakiler_ is not a good one to prove the opposite.


What's wrong with the example? 

Uşak has two different accents depending on the meaning: *Úşak *and *Uşák*. Modus asks if* -ler* changes the meaning and the answer is no, it does not unless it denotes an exceptional word such as a loan-word or a name of a place like I've said. Uşak, being a name of a place besides the name for a manservant, is one of those exceptions.




Spectre scolaire said:


> If you ask a Hungarian to pronounce this word, you will hear how it sounds like in a language where _all_ words have an accent on the first syllable – and quite a clearly recognizable one at that!


Excuse me but why should I ask a Hungarian to pronounce a word because I'm cursious about stress in Turkish?



Spectre scolaire said:


> Then the question arises: What is the diffrence between a Turk and a Hungarian pronouncing Uşaktakiler?! –according to _Chazzwozzer_’s indications of the first.


Again, how come we talk about the differences in pronunciation between Turkish and Hungarian while the matter of discussion is _Uşaktakiler _here?


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## Spectre scolaire

I don’t think it is fair to make the question of accent in Turkish into a contentious one. What I said was that this is “an extrememly delicate subject”, and a common factor with “delicate subjects” is that generalizations are difficult to make. Now, I do make a sort of generalization myself by saying that Turkish stress patterns have some striking similarities to French stress pattern, and as you know, French does not have any pitch accent. I also mentioned Italian and Hungarian as two examples of languages where the accent is very easily recognizable. In Turkish there is no such easily recognizable accent! This is the whole problem.

But compared to French, Turkish is not completely devoid of accent – only the precise nature of it is extremely difficult to pin down. There _are_ words which have a clearly recognizable pitch – especially when pronounced independently. But in a larger context like a whole passage with several sentences, even this accent (which you are entitled to claim on certain words) would tend to be very much like the one you could call “intensity accent” and which would depend more on the content of the uttering than on the morphology of its constituting words. This does not mean – I repeat myself - that single words would not exhibit an increased pitch, but you cannot generalize which words would receive such a pitch, and there is also a kind of “accent sandhi” – not unlike Chinese “toneme sandhi” - in which the accent of a word would be modified according to what comes after it. 

In such a “climate” of _accentual vagueness_, as it were, I don’t think it is right to ask anybody to say adamantly what is correct and what is not correct. It all depends on context, and however much you dislike my Hungarian comparison, I think it would be pedagogically enlightening to hear the difference between a Hungarian word containing five syllables and the pronunciation of the Turkish word Uşaktakiler. 

One more feature of Turkish stress patterns should be mentioned, a feature which has some bearing on the _perception of accent_. This feature would be slightly controversial – at least in its consequences. As far as I know, it has never been studied properly. It is about Arabic loanwords in Turkish.

I’ll leave it there for the time being, but I’ll be glad to elaborate further on this fascinating subject of “accent in Turkish”.


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## avok

modus.irrealis said:


> Hi,
> 
> And finally, about _-ler_, does it always have the accent? Would you say _yorgúndurlar_ or _yorgundurlár_, or something else altogether?
> 
> Thanks.


 
I think I would go for  _yorgúndurlar_ to mean that they are tired. But _yorgundurlár _to mean that they may be tired. Well actually I never say yorgundurlar at first place, I say "yorgunlardır".


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## avok

Spectre scolaire said:


> Now, I do make a sort of generalization myself by saying that Turkish stress patterns have some striking similarities to French stress pattern, In Turkish there is no such easily recognizable accent! This is the whole problem.


 
I agree with you. But I also think that the stress in French is rather monotonous in comparison with Turkish. For example think of the name "Clara" or "Sarah", Turkish speakers, even if they can't speak a word of a foreign language, would put the stress on "Cl*aa*ra" and "S*aa*rah"- without noticing it- but the French would go "Clar*a*" and "Sar*ah*".


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