Transcriptions used in TELL

For more on Turkish and the IPA, see Zimmer, Karl and Orhan Orgun (1992), "Illustrations of the IPA: Turkish", in Journal of the International Phonetic Association 22:1/2.

Stress, which is phonemic in Turkish, is not marked in dictionary entries. It is, however, encoded in the transcribed elicited forms with a single quote mark following the vowel in a stressed syllable.

Vowel length, which is also phonemic, is represented with the ":" symbol following a long vowel in the transcribed forms. (Turkish orthography encodes vowel length unsystematically and uses an ambiguous symbol (a caret over a vowel indicates either that the vowel is long or that the preceding consonant is phonemically palatalized).)

Special notes: The Turkish alphabet, though mainly phonemic, has one letter which does not correspond to a phoneme. "Soft-g", or "g@" in our ascii transcription, corresponds historically to the lost velar fricative. In the speech of our consultant, the synchronic reflex of soft-g is vowel length when syllable-final and silence when syllable-initial.

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