A Study on Vowel-Consonant Harmony Violating Words in Turkey Turkish

As an agglutinative language, the vowels and consonants come together and form the stems and affixes in line with certain rules in Turkish. Affixes, mostly suffixes, in Turkish are bound to the stem both in terms of semantics and phonetics and they change their form based on the nature of the last vowel of the word to which they attach. While vowels in stem that take affix show harmony in terms of the position of the tongue and lips; for example, affixes that start with c/？, d/t, g/k and form syllable show harmony in terms of vocal cords when they are agglutinated to words in the forms of base, stem and case. In Turkish, the letters g and k correspond both palate-alveolar and velar /g/ and /k/, whereas, letter l corresponds both alveolar and post alveolar /l/. Therefore, it is commonly observed that students have difficulties pronouncing palate-alveolar (front palate consonants) /g/, /k/ and alveolar (front cheek consonant) /l/ in the words of which the stems are formed with back vowels. Thus, it can be claimed that any one, especially students, might violate this vowel-consonant harmony in pronunciation of the words formed with these consonants either while speaking or writing in Turkish. The primary aim of the present study is to compile a systematic index of vowel-consonant harmony violating words that took place in online Contemporary Turkish Dictionary of Turkish Language Association through a document analysis approach. Secondly, these vowel-consonant harmony violating words have been examined in detail in terms of their phonology, morphology as well as their word formation. As the final step, the grammar teaching and related sources have been examined in order to figure out how and to what extend these vowel-consonant harmony violating words took place in those sources. Consequently, findings of the present study have been discussed in line with teaching Turkish grammar and some suggestions based on the findings of the study will be proposed