Formant Frequency Values And Enclise “Sound” Event Of Vowels In Turkish

Turkish, in its structure has independent word roots and suffixes that are attained to them, is an agglutinating language. It takes into account the harmony and coherence and provides this by establishing a harmony between word roots, suffixes, and other words. In Turkish, during the combination of roots and suffixes first voice resembles the second voice to itself. When two roots, with a front vowel and a stay vowel combines to form a word, in general, it is not depending on being the first or the second voice, the dominant voice resembles the other one to itself. This is called “enclise” in language. Enclise occurs by switching the dominant vowel voice charecters with non-dominant ones and this takes place in accordance with qualitative and quantitative values of voices. As a result of this, enclose is a phonological result and phonetic case for combining words. Enclise is an orthographical matter because it occurs in connecting and contiguous words. It is also related to grammar and spelling. There can not be any enclise within non-connecting and non-contiguous words. Enclise and enclitic is not same for Turkish morpheme. Enclitic is formed by connecting an independent word with a meaning carrier clictics like “de”, “mi” or “ile” and it is limited to the second word. On the other hand, enclise is formed by connecting at least two words within the word-word space, that’s why it can be seen in both first and second word. In order enclise to occur, there must be a difference between first and second vowels in terms of being first or stay vowels and during the combination process this difference must be eliminated and the compliance must be ensured. Enclise is a fact for languages that has a sound integration, and thus it is a crucial characteristic for Turkish. Evaluations that derives from the formant frequency values of the vowels in Turkish gives meaningful results about enclise. This study, based on a sampling analysis made use of the vowels F1-F0 and F3-F2 formant frequency values that are converted to barks to investigate new and old compound and contiguous words from several periods of Turkish Language attained significant results.

Keywords

Turkish, vowel, compound word , enclise, formant frequency