Turkish Grammar

by Geoffrey Lewis

Incorporating much new material, this new edition of the standard work presents an authoritative, lucid, and engaging text, setting out every form and construction of pre- and post-reform Turkish that may be encountered in print, as well as colloquial usages.

Genres: Turkish, Linguistics

325 pages, Paperback

First published August 16, 2000

About the author

Geoffrey Lewis was an English Turkologist and the first professor of Turkish at the University of Oxford. He is known as the author of Teach Yourself Turkish and academic books about Turkish and Turkey.

Lewis was born in London in 1920 and educated at University College School and St John's College, Oxford (MA 1945, DPhil 1950; James Mew Arabic Scholar, 1947).

At St John's College Lewis initially studied Classics. With the outbreak of the Second World War, he served from 1940 to 1945 as a radar operator in the Royal Air Force. Posted primarily in Libya and Egypt, he taught himself Turkish through local Turkish acquaintances, from the Turkish newspaper Yedi Gün available in Cairo, and from Turkish translations of English classics sent to him by his wife. He returned to Oxford in 1945 with his newly acquired interest in Turkish and on the advice of H. A. R. Gibb took a second BA degree in Arabic and Persian as groundwork for Ottoman Turkish, which he finished with first-class honours (not achieved in this double subject since Anthony Eden in 1922) in just two years. He spent six months in Turkey before pursuing his doctoral work on a medieval Arabic philosophical treatise at St John's College.

Turkish was not taught at Oxford before Lewis was appointed to his academic post in 1950; it was through his efforts that it became established in the Oxford syllabus of Oriental studies by 1964.

Reviews

[Christopher · Rating 5 out of 5]

Geoffrey Lewis' TURKISH GRAMMAR, first published by Oxford in 1967 with a second edition in 2000, is *the* reference grammar of Turkish for speakers of English. Besides the usual paradigms of substantive declension and verb conjugation, it covers a host of other concepts that present a challenge to the foreign learner. The chapter on word formation is excellent, and understanding word formation is vital after nearly a century of commonly deriving new lexemes from pre-existing Turkic roots. The chapter on number, case and apposition cover matters which prove very difficult for English speakers to tackle, things like agreement of plural nouns and verbs (or lack thereoff) and when to use izafet linking (and when not). A very nice extra is a chapter which gives a word-by-word demonstration of how one sets about translating a complicated sentence. Would that more grammars include such material.

The second edition of the book gives a much vaster view of the impact of language reform on contemporary Turkish, much of which is distilled from the research which led to Lewis' great monograph of 1999: THE TURKISH LANGUAGE REFORM: A Catastrophic Success. It's a pity that Oxford set this second edition in a sans serif typeface, which is rather hard on the eyes.

Basically, if you study Turkish, you need this book. Yes, it's an academic book and goes for a high sum, but you'd be wise to make the investment.

[Strong Extraordinary Dreams · Rating 5 out of 5]

It's just a beautiful book, a joy to read, to pick up at any time. And its depth, the reader is constantly in the presence of a true authority.