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some comments on turkish phonology

march 2023 (edited)

a regular turkish person, who usually is not aware of the distinction between spelling and phonetics, might claim that turkish, among all the languages in the world, is special: "turkish is pronounced as it is written", i.e., every letter in turkish alphabet is pronounced the same way in every possible instance. turkish might be considered to have a high phonetic consistency but some consonants have ambiguous pronunciations.

a quick vocabulary check before the examples: voiced and voiceless refer to whether the vocal cords vibrate during the sound or not, a tap/flap is made with a single quick contact of the articulator, an approximant is made by narrowing the vocal tract without full contact, and a fricative is made by forcing air through a narrow gap, creating turbulent noise.

some examples of inconsistencies

of course one may argue that these allophonic alternations don't create any real ambiguity for a native speaker — and that would be correct, but not because turkish specially avoids ambiguity. it's because these variants are entirely predictable from their phonetic environment (word position, neighboring vowel backness or rounding) or, in a few cases, from a word's borrowing history: a speaker never has to guess which allophone to produce, since context or the lexicon determines it.