What's with that dot on the first letter of İstanbul in your last post, Leslie?
Well, I'm glad you asked! (Someone really did ask me this over the weekend, and I really was glad.) Turkish has two versions of the letter i, and they represent different sounds. The one with the dot, written i in lower case and İ in upper case, is pronounced like the vowel in English beet, or perhaps bit.
(I am not clear on this point because my Turkish textbook says the former – pronounce it like beet – but my Turkish professor pronounces it more like bit. Maybe I'll report on this once I've heard more native Turkish speech.)
The one without the dot, written as ı in lower case and I in upper case, represents a high back tense unrounded sound. If that means nothing to you, it sounds a little like the u in English cup, but with the back of the tongue a little closer to the roof of the mouth. Or the Russian vowel ы, but with the tongue a bit farther back toward the throat.
Anyway. İf İstanbul were written without the dot in Turkish, it would sound kind of like Uhstanbul. Since there's no such problem in English, İ guess there's no reason to keep writing it as İstanbul in this English-language blog, except that İ like capital dotted i.
-Yelİz
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Tesekkur ederim. :-)
ReplyDelete<3, L