Today in Linguistic Field Methods, we made a number of breakthroughs regarding Turkish! First we found that Turkish values vowel agreement between root words and suffixes - but then, when discovering prepositions, we found that they intentionally shifted their vowels to DISagree with the root! This is fascinating behavior; one hypothesis we developed is that Turkish may be using a phonetic marker (suffix vowels) to transmit semantic meaning!
We also determined that Turkish finds the accusative case important enough to mark twice - once, with sentence order (Subject, Object, Verb), and again with a special suffix /-[vowel]/.
Ercan has worked tirelessly, answering questions, and everyone else is becoming comfortable speaking out loud in Turkish! And then Charles brought elves into the discussion, and things got confusing. But overall, a day of great progress!
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