How to pronounce Gallipoli place names?

The first thing to keep in mind when trying to pronounce a place name the proper way, is that the Turkish language uses a spelling system that is almost entirely phonetic. In other words : for every sound you hear, you write one character and vice versa.

In English this is not so. Just think of  “four” <-> “more”.

For vowels, there are not many problems : all vowels are short, "u" has the sound of "book" and the ones with a “¨” (an umlaut) above them are pronounced as in German. There is one exception though : Turkish knows the symbol “ ı “ (an i without a dot) to represent a mute e (as in “better”)

For consonants, the situation is a bit more complicated. As Turkish uses more sounds that we have characters in our alphabet, they need some more spelling symbols in theirs. Apart from that, the phonetic value of some characters is a bit different from what we are used to as well.

The unfamiliar ones (for us) are :

c  as pronounced in “John”

ç  as pronounced in “cheat”

ş  as pronounced in “sure”

j   as pronounced in French “Jean”

y  as pronounced in “you”

v  as pronounced in "what"

The last one is a bit weird. It is the “ ğ “ or soft g. As a matter of fact, you do not really pronounce it as such, but it lenghtens the vowel just in front of it. So you would pronounce the word “doğan” something like “doo-an” (and “doo” as the music note)

If this is clear, let’s have a look at some place names then :

Conkbayırı      =  “djonk bayere” (and e 2 times as in "better")

Alçıtepe            =  “altshetepe” (1st e as in "better" and the next 2 as in “bed”)

Ağyl Dere         =  “ayel dere”   (1st e as in better and the  next 2 as in “bed”)

Kırmızı Sırt        =  “kermeze sert”  (4 e's as in “better”). Did you notice the dots were missing?

Avustralya         =  have a guess yourself