Language, Multilingualism & Culture

Languages as a lifelong journey of discovery

Languages have accompanied me throughout my life. At school I learned Latin, French and English. Later I studied Italian intensively and also spent some time with Russian, Dutch and Greek. In recent years, Turkish has been added.

Today, my English is close to native-speaker level. I speak and understand French very well, although my spontaneous spoken French is not always as perfect and effortless as I would like. My Italian is good.

I am particularly fascinated by relationships between languages: shared roots, sound shifts, related grammatical forms, loanwords and the traces left by historical contact between cultures.

Indo-European relationships

German, English, French, Italian, Latin, Russian and Greek all belong — despite their major differences — to the Indo-European language family. This is why familiar structures and words keep reappearing across them.

Turkish: a very different linguistic world

Turkish is especially fascinating to me because it does not belong to the Indo-European language family, but to the Turkic languages. Many of the familiar bridges that help when learning European languages are therefore missing.

Agglutination

Turkish is strongly agglutinative: grammatical information is often expressed by adding a sequence of suffixes to a word stem. A single Turkish word can therefore express what would require several words in German or English.

Vowel harmony

Many suffixes do not have a single fixed form. Their vowels adapt to the word stem. This vowel harmony is unfamiliar at first to learners from a German-speaking background.

A different sentence logic

Turkish often places the verb at the end of the sentence. In simplified terms, a neutral sentence frequently follows the pattern subject – object – verb. Turkish also makes extensive use of case endings, often uses postpositions rather than prepositions, and can pack a great deal of grammatical information into suffix chains.

Migrated thematic areas