Turkish and Azerbaijani

Noun morphology

Turkish has several cases:

absolute, definite-accusative, dative, locative, ablative, genitive

It also has pronominal clitics.

Typically these are applied in the following order:

1. plural suffix
2. suffix of possession
3. case-ending
4. personal suffix

kitap for ex. is the stem
kitap + plural + pronoun 
kitaplar is the "books"

a noun has five cases

object direction is the "i case"

give me that book for ex.
bana o kitabı ver

"that book"
kitabı 

that is directed to object

from that book = kitaptan
in that book = kitapta

"from my book"
kitab+ım+dan

"from my books"
kitap+lar+ım+dan

Agglutination case

verb= gitmek stem=git

I'm going = gidiyorum (tr) 
          = gidirem (azerbaijani)

gid+iyor+um (present continous, pr1, turkish)
gid+ir+em  (present continous, pr1, azerbaijani)

git (lemma) -i -yor (for continous tense) -um (for first personal pronoun)   (turkish)
git (lemma) -i -r(for continous tense)  -em (for first personal pronoun)  (azerbaijani)

Vowel harmony

Both Turkish and Azerbaijani, along with most other Turkic languages exhibit vowel harmony. See the following table of inflections for the word pivə, "beer" in Azerbaijani. Underscore indicates a vowel that has been "harmonised".

Azerbaijani	Gloss	pivə	beer
pivəler	beers
pivəlerim	my beers
pivədən	from beer
pivələrdən	from beers

This will pose a problem for both analysis and generation of word forms. In analysis it is possible to overanlayse words, e.g. say have a paradigm for "a → e" for the plural ending -ler, which would accept both -ler and -lar. Then we would analyse both the correct form: biralar and an incorrect form biraler. This causes problems because of ambiguity (we shouldn't be analysing non-existant words!), especially on short words. It remains to be seen if this ambiguity will be too great.

The other problem is generation, we do not currently have a way in apertium to enforce vowel harmony, it may be possible to use an alternate spell-checker to do this (e.g. hunspell has specialised algorithms for both Azerbaijani and Turkish, or possible we could use post-gen or write a new post-gen module for this.

Test case

• Turkish: biram var.
• Azerbaijani: pivəm var

beer+p1 have

I have a beer.

• Turkish: iki biram var
• Azerbijani: iki pivəm var

two beer+p1 have

I have two beers

Noun

• abs — absolute
• dac — definite-accusative
• dat — dative
• abl — ablative
• loc — locative
• gen — genitive

Turkish

person	n.sg.abs	n.sg.dac	n.sg.dat	n.sg.loc	n.sg.abl	n.sg.gen
none	bira
p1.sg	biram
p2.sg
p3.sg
p1.pl
p2.pl
p3.pl
person	n.pl.abs	n.pl.dac	n.pl.dat	n.pl.loc	n.pl.abl	n.pl.gen
none	biralar
p1.sg	biralarım
p2.sg
p3.sg
p1.pl
p2.pl
p3.pl

Azerbaijani

person	n.sg.abs	n.sg.dac	n.sg.dat	n.sg.loc	n.sg.abl	n.sg.gen
none	pivə
p1.sg	pivəm
p2.sg
p3.sg
p1.pl
p2.pl
p3.pl
person	n.pl.abs	n.pl.dac	n.pl.dat	n.pl.loc	n.pl.abl	n.pl.gen
none	pivəler
p1.sg	pivəlerim
p2.sg
p3.sg
p1.pl
p2.pl
p3.pl

Comparison

Turkish	Azerbaijani	Gloss	Symbols
bira	pivə	beer	n.sg
biralar	pivəler	beers	n.pl
biram	pivəm	my beer	n.sg.p1
biralarım	pivəlerim	my beers	n.pl.p1
biradan	pivədən	from the beer	n.sg.fromcase
biralardan	pivələrdən	from the beers	n.pl.fromcase
biramdan	pivəmdən	from my beer	n.sg.p1.fromcase
biralarımdan	pivlərimdən	from my beers	n.pl.p1.fromcase

Verb

Turkish	Azerbaijani	Gloss
var	var	I have
		You have
		He has
		She has
		It has
		You (pl.) have
		We have
		They have