From: Peter Kirk (peterkirk@qaya.org)
Date: Thu Dec 18 2003 - 09:00:51 EST
On 18/12/2003 05:33, Mark E. Shoulson wrote:
> On 12/18/03 06:54, Peter Kirk wrote:
>
>> You will find that the spellings "millî" (19,600 Google matches) and
>> "milli" (709,000 matches, but not all are Turkish) are
>> interchangeable, but "millı" is rare (52 matches) and so probably an
>> error.
>
>
> Wouldn't "?millı" be a violation of Turkish vowel-harmony rules?
>
> ~mark
>
Yes, but these rules apply strictly only to suffixes. Most words of
Turkic origin also follow them internally, but loan words do not.
"Millî" is a loan word from Arabic and so not bound by the vowel harmony
rules. But Arabic does not have the dotless i sound and so both i's must
be dotted. As the latter corresponds to a long Arabic vowel it is often
written with a circumflex. This also serves to distinguish this word
from the noun "mil" (3 meanings: pivot; silt; mile) with the adjectival
suffix "-li" (not "-lı" here because of vowel harmony); but "mil" +
"-li" is rare and the spelling "milli" is much more commonly a variant
of "millî".
-- Peter Kirk peter@qaya.org (personal) peterkirk@qaya.org (work) http://www.qaya.org/
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