The Two Great Challenges to Learning Turkic Languages

In approaching the Turkic languages, I have found, there are only two major difficulties: 1) the words... 2) what to do with them...

I can see you wiping the sweat off your brow already! Actually, while these two items - i.e. the whole of the languages - are going to prove a bit challenging, they don't have to prove insurmountable obstacles to the learner who knows what he or she is getting into. Coming up, we have:

• a look at how geography, culture and history shaped Turkic vocabulary
• thoughts on the morphology (word patterns) of Turkic vs. common European languages
• what the dread vowel harmony has to do with all this

Sound like a lot? When you're done reading, you'll have seen it's a piece of cake.