Prefixes in Turkish

Brief history

In the early 19th century, The hypothesis of Ural-Altaic language family was an effort to associate different languages with each other through some similarities. The accepted idea today is that there is a common ancestry between the languages listed in this family 1. Japanese and Korean are geographically close to each other and considered as an isolated languages, Turkic languages are closer to Korean than Japanese in linguistic similarity. For this reason, Korean and Turkic languages were accepted as an Altaic branch in the old theory2. Many of these languages are now being studied as isolated languages, Turkic langugaes itself. Similarities of these languages are still attractive for researchers.

Agglutinative language

In languages with aggluginative structure, words acquire new meanings by affixes. Smallest linguistic unit is called morphemes and can be prefixes and suffixes as well as the root/base form of the word. The sequential addition of morphemes is expressed by the metaphor "beads on a string".

For Morphological Typology topic, you can see Introduction to Linguistic Science notes of Berkeley university by Jonathan Manker(26 February 2016).

Turkish is a canonical agglutinative language in terms of word production structure. In Turkish, words are formed by suffixes and there are no prefixes.

Example;

root	suffix	suffix	suffix
yaz	-abil	-ir	-sin
verb(base form)	can(ability)	tense(simple present)	personal pronoun(you-singular)

Prefixes in Turkish

Despite the common belief that there is no prefix in Turkish, there are some western&eastern based borrowed prefixes.Also, in some cases the words appears as if they have a prefix. The exceptions that create this controversial situation can be listed as follows.

• Compound words
• ex:asteğmen, ilköğretim, küçükbaş, çokgen, etc.
• Reinforced words
• ex:güpgüzel, bembeyaz, (sandalye) mandalye, (ev) mev, etc.

Some Western based prefixes

• Note:Some suffixes can be used in more than one language. For example, the suffix "contra" is of Latin origin, and it is controversial whether it has passed into our language through French or Italian.

Language	prefix
Latin	a-, an-, anti-, inter-, ko-, re-, sür-, maxi-
Greek	bi-, bis-, dis-, epi-, fos-, jeo-, hipo-, hiper-, hidro-, mikro-, neo-
English	kardio-, oto-, ex-
Italian	kontra-
French	de-, des-, pre- ,

Some Eastern based prefixes

Language	prefix
Persian	bi-, hem-, na-
Arabic	gayr-, la-, adem-, bila-

To learn more about prefixes you can read related articles click 3, 4, 5, 6

In here you can reach list of affixes (pre&suffixes) in Turkish.

References

1. Georg, S. (2017). Other isolated languages of Asia. Language isolates, 139-161.
2. Tambovtsev, Y. (2008). Typological Distance Between Korean And The Other Languages Of Asia. Lingua Posnaniensis, (50), 177-186.
3. ÇELİK, A. (2015). About the Current Status of Western-Based Prefixes Which are Used as Words in Turkish.
4. Şahin, H. (2006). Türkçe'de Ön Ek. Uludağ Üniversitesi Fen-Edebiyat Fakültesi Sosyal Bilimler Dergisi, 7(10), 65-77.
5. DEMİREZEN, M. (2005). ÇAĞDAŞ TÜRKÇEDE İKİNCİL SESLETİM SORUNLARI. Türk Dili Araştırmaları Yıllığı-Belleten, 53(2005/1), 56-68.
6. Zülfikar, H. (2018). Eklendiği Kelimeyle “Yokluk” Anlamı Kazanan EklerTürk Dili, 68, 793-800.