Nouns & gender
Turkish has no grammatical gender at all — not on nouns, not on adjectives, not even on pronouns: o is "he", "she" and "it". What a Turkish noun does have is a stack of suffixes in a fixed order, and six cases that do the work of English prepositions and word order.
No gender, anywhere
| Turkish | gloss |
|---|---|
| o geldi | he came / she came / it came |
| öğretmen | teacher (man or woman) |
| arkadaş | friend (either) |
| kardeş | younger brother or sister |
When sex matters, a word says so: erkek kardeş "brother" (male sibling), kız kardeş "sister", kadın doktor "woman doctor". The kinship vocabulary carries it on its own: abla older sister, ağabey / abi older brother, teyze mother's sister, hala father's sister, dayı mother's brother, amca father's brother.
The six cases
Every case is a suffix, and every suffix follows vowel harmony (see Plurals): ev "house" has front vowels, araba "car" back ones and ends in a vowel, so it shows the buffer letters.
| case | job | ev | araba | example |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| nominative | subject, bare object | ev | araba | Ev büyük. — The house is big. |
| genitive -(n)in | of, 's | evin | arabanın | evin kapısı — the door of the house |
| accusative -(y)i | the (specific) object | evi | arabayı | Evi gördüm. — I saw the house. |
| dative -(y)e | to, towards | eve | arabaya | Eve gidiyorum. — I'm going home. |
| locative -de | in, on, at | evde | arabada | Evdeyim. — I'm at home. |
| ablative -den | from, out of | evden | arabadan | Evden geliyorum. — I'm coming from home. |
A seventh ending, -(y)le "with" (from the postposition ile), behaves almost like a case: arabayla "by car", Ali'yle "with Ali". See Prepositions.
Two sound rules ride on top:
- d → t after a voiceless consonant (f s t k ç ş h p): kitapta "in the book", sokaktan "from the street", Paris'te.
- p ç t k soften to b c d ğ before a vowel, in most words of two or more syllables: kitap → kitabın, ağaç → ağaca, köpek → köpeği. Most one-syllable words keep theirs (top → topu, saç → saçı).
Proper names take the endings after an apostrophe: İstanbul'da, Ankara'ya, Ayşe'nin.
The suffix order
Endings stack in one order, and never another: noun + plural + possessive + case.
ev-ler-imiz-de → evlerimizde — "in our houses" araba-lar-ı-n-dan → arabalarından — "from his / their cars"
Noun + noun: the compound with -(s)i
Two nouns join with a possessive ending on the second, with s as the buffer after a vowel:
| Turkish | gloss |
|---|---|
| Türk kahvesi | Turkish coffee |
| okul müdürü | school principal |
| İstanbul Üniversitesi | Istanbul University |
| Ali'nin arabası | Ali's car (genitive + possessive: both ends marked) |
Where the nouns come from
A large share of everyday vocabulary is borrowed: Arabic kitap book, saat hour, dünya world; Persian pencere window, hafta week; French kuaför hairdresser, asansör lift, otobüs bus; Italian banka, lokanta. The 1930s language reform coined replacements for many of them — okul school, öğretmen teacher, uçak aeroplane — and both layers live side by side.
Against Korean and Japanese
Like them, Turkish has no gender and puts its "prepositions" after the noun. The difference is that Korean and Japanese particles are separate little words that barely change, while Turkish case endings are glued on and change their vowels to match the noun.
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