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Originally Posted by omk3
W seems to be a special little letter indeed.
I'm quoting from Wikipedia:
(bold mine)
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ha very interesting ! thanks for that. and yes, in french, those are all examples of words using W. probably the most common is "wagon" (it's an individual car on a train), but we pronounce it "vagon" with a long o and the n barely pronounced at all. brilliant french author Raymon Queneau used to make up hilarious phonetic spellings of those imported words, so for instance "ouïquende" for "weekend".
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Zelda I didn't know about the si, thanks! I only knew about si meaning if.
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yep, it's really useful !
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The Turkish alphabet seems to have the same elegance as the Czech, using Ç and Ş for the ch and sh sounds. They also follow vowel harmony, where the suffices of words take a different vowel according to the last vowel of the stem. So the suffix for plural can be either -ler or -lar of example.
Many words are common in Turkish and Greek, and both have borrowed words from the other. We lived together for 400 years after all ( ). So sometimes you encounter funny things like tomates and patates. That's the plural for tomatoes and potatoes in Greek, but the singular for tomatoes and potatoes in Turkish. It felt very strange to have to add the -ler to patates when ordering fries.
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ha nice, i didn't know about the turkish accented letters ! thanks ! there are a lot of words which sound similar / identical between french and english but have different meanings (we call them "false friends") but i can't think of any quite like tomates / tomates just now... ("tomates" is the french plural of tomatoes and "patates" = "potatoes" also, though, so the same situation will occur between french and turk, except we don't order fries "patates" we just say "frites"
).