Turkish language

Grammar

Turkish has an abundance of suffixes, but no prefixes (apart from the reduplicating intensifier prefix as in beyaz="white", bembeyaz="very white", s?cak="hot", s?ps?cak="very hot"). (Some Arabic loan words have their own prefixes, but those are the common prefixes of Arabic.) One word can have many suffixes. Suffixes can be used to create new words (see #Vocabulary) or to indicate the grammatical function of a word.

Related Topics:
Suffix - #Vocabulary

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Turkish nouns can take endings indicating the person of a possessor.

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They can take case-endings, as in Latin. (The series of case-endings is the same for every noun, except for spelling changes owing to vowel harmony, and variation between voiced and unvoiced consonants.)

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Finally, they can take endings that give them a person and make them into sentences:

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ev "house",

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eviniz "your house",

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evinizde "at your house",

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Evinizdeyiz "We are at your house."

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Turkish adjectives as such are not declined (though they can generally be used as nouns, in which case they are declined).

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Used attributively, they precede the nouns they modify.

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Turkish verbs exhibit person.

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They can be made negative or impotential; they can also be made potential.

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Finally, Turkish verbs exhibit various distinctions of tense, mood, and aspect: a verb can be progressive, necessitative, aorist, future, inferential, present, past, conditional, imperative, or optative.

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gel- "(to) come",

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gelme- "not (to) come",

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geleme- "not (to) be able to come",

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gelebil- "(to) be able to come",

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Gelememi? "She was apparently unable to come."

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Gelememi?ti "She had apparently been unable to come."

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Gelememi?tiniz "You had apparently been unable to come."

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Gelememi? miydiniz? "Was it the case that you had been unable to come?"

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All Turkish verbs are conjugated the same way, except for the irregular and defective verb i- (see Turkish copula), which can be used in compound forms:

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Gelememi?ti = Gelememi? idi = Gelememi? + i- + -di

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Word order in Turkish is generally Subject Object Verb, as in Japanese and Latin, but not English.

Related Topics:
Subject Object Verb - Japanese - Latin - English

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This can be seen in the following sentence from a newspaper (Cumhuriyet, 16 August 2005, p. 1). The sentence uses all noun cases except the genitive:

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Türkiye'de moday? gazete sayfalar?na ta??yan,

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gazetemiz yazarlar?ndan N. S. ya?am?n? yitirdi:

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Türkiye'de "in Turkey" (locative)

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moday? "fashion" (accusative of moda)

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gazete "newspaper" (nominative)

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sayfalar?na "to its pages" (dative; sayfa "page",

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sayfalar "pages",

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sayfalar? "its pages")

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ta??yan, "carrying" (present participle of ta??-)

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gazetemiz "our newspaper" (nominative)

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yazarlar?ndan "from its writers" (ablative; yazar "writer")

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N. S. (nominative)

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ya?am?n? "her life" (accusative; ya?am "life")

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yitirdi. "lost" (past tense of yitir- "lose"

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from yit- "be lost")

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"One of the writers of our newspaper, N. S.,

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who brought fashion to newspaper pages in Turkey, lost her life."

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