1.6 Long and Short Vowels

Another interesting feature of Turkmen is the use of long and short vowels. Short vowels are like those in English, like the a in "bar." Long vowels simply require pronouncing

short vowels for the duration of two vowels. Often this difference in duration is all that distinguishes the meanings of two words, as in the pairs below:

SHORT		LONG
at	horse	at	name
gyz	get excited! (imperative)	gyz	girl
bil	know! (imperative)	bil	waist
ot	grass	ot	fire
öç	extinguish! (imperative)	öç	revenge
gurt	curd, dry cheese	gurt	wolf, worm
düş	come down! (imperative)	düýş	dream

1.7 Vocal Transformations

Certain consonant combinations are rendered differently in spoken Turkmen than their written forms would indicate. For example, the nd of mende (on my person) is pronounced "nn" when spoken (menne). The following chart will illustrate these combinations and examples with the spoken transformations rendered in the new alphabet.:

Written	Spoken	Written	Spoken	Translation
n + d	nn	sende	senne	on your person
l + d	ll	aldym	allym	I took
z + d	zz	agyzda	agyzza	in the mouth
s + d	ss	bäsdeş	bässeş	rival
s + t	ss	üsti	üssi	top, surface
ş+ j	şş	goşjak	goşşak	will add
z + s	ss	ýazsyn	ýassyn	let him write
t + s	ss	gitse	gisse	if she goes
t + ç	çç	parahatçylyk	parahaççylyk	peace
ç + s	şs	açsa	aşsa	if it opens
ç + l	şl	açlyk	aşlyk	hunger, famine
ç + d	şd	geçdik	geşdik	we passed
ç + j	şş	içjek	işşek	will drink
g + b	gw	bagban	bagwan	gardener

2.0 The Case System

Like Russian or German, Turkic languages have a system of grammatical cases. Cases are defined by changes that occur to a word when it is placed in different grammatical context. English has cases for personal prounouns. For example: "I see him", "He sees me". Not: "Me sees he", "Him sees I". Turkmen, however, has six cases, and these cases are used for all words, not just personal prounouns. The six Turkmen cases are: the nominative, used for the subject of the sentence; the possessive, similar to English possessives; the dative, used to show directed action; the accusative, which is similar to the English "direct object"; the time/place, which shows locality; and the instrumental, which is used to show origin.

While six cases might seem a bit overwhelming at first, it should be noted that the case suffixes simply replace our English prepositions such as "from," "at," "with," "in," "on," and "to". Also, the rules for their use are remarkably simple and inflexible, unlike those of the Russian cases.