For the numbers 1-10, please go here.
Whenever I do a unit that covers all three of the languages I blog about, I always end with Turkish. After bouncing back and forth between Latin and Arabic script to do Arabic and Persian, it’s pretty nice to finish up without having to do that. That’s like quadruply true for this unit, because not only do we get to stay in Latin script, but Turkish also has a more logical system when it comes to handling numbers past 10. Where a lot of languages, including Arabic and Persian (and English) have a slightly altered form for the numbers 11-19, or once you get into the hundreds, Turkish does not. It’s as simple as can be. First let’s count by 10s to 100:
- 10 (ten): on
- 20 (twenty): yirmi
- 30 (thirty): otuz
- 40 (forty): kırk
- 50 (fifty): elli
- 60 (sixty): altmış
- 70 (seventy): yetmiş
- 80 (eighty): seksen
- 90 (ninety): doksan
- 100 (one hundred): yüz
- 1000 (one thousand): bin
You may see that I cheated there and skipped straight from 100 to 1000. That’s because Turkish, unlike Arabic and Persian, doesn’t have any special form for even hundreds. As in English, if you want to say “four hundred,” you literally say “four hundred,” or dört yüz, and “seven hundred” is yedi yüz. Likewise, “fifteen” is simply “ten five” or on beş, “sixty-eight” is altmış sekiz, and “one hundred twenty-nine” is yüz yirmi dokuz. That’s it. If you refer back to the lesson on the numbers 1-10 and this lesson, you can put together any number up to a million pretty easily. Hell, this was so easy to write I’ll even throw in the Turkish word for “million” as a bonus. Are you ready? This might be tricky…
Just kidding. It’s milyon. You gotta love Turkish.
Turkish Word a Day 
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