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Past tenses
Turkish has two simple pasts, and the difference is not time but how you know. -di is the past you witnessed or are sure of; -miş is the past you were told about, inferred from evidence, or have just discovered. Grammar books call this evidentiality, and it is the big idea of the chapter.
-di: the witnessed past
Four-way harmony, and d → t after a voiceless consonant (f s t k ç ş h p). Its person endings are short:
| gelmek | yapmak | görmek | konuşmak | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| ben | geldim | yaptım | gördüm | konuştum |
| sen | geldin | yaptın | gördün | konuştun |
| o | geldi | yaptı | gördü | konuştu |
| biz | geldik | yaptık | gördük | konuştuk |
| siz | geldiniz | yaptınız | gördünüz | konuştunuz |
| onlar | geldiler | yaptılar | gördüler | konuştular |
Dün sinemaya gittim. — "I went to the cinema yesterday." Yemek yedin mi? — "Have you eaten?"
-miş: reported, inferred, discovered
Four-way harmony, regular endings: gelmişim, gelmişsin, gelmiş, gelmişiz, gelmişsiniz, gelmişler.
| -di | -miş |
|---|---|
| Yağmur yağdı. — It rained. (I saw it) | Yağmur yağmış. — It rained, apparently. (the street is wet) |
| Ali geldi. — Ali came. | Ali gelmiş. — Ali has come, I hear. / Oh, Ali's here! |
| Sınavı geçtim. — I passed the exam. | Sınavı geçmişim! — I passed! (just found out) |
Three uses of -miş:
- hearsay: Ahmet evlenmiş. — "Ahmet got married (so I'm told)." News reports use it for anything unconfirmed.
- inference: Kar yağmış. — "It's snowed." (said at the window in the morning)
- surprise: Ne kadar büyümüşsün! — "How you've grown!"
Fairy tales begin with it, because nobody witnessed them: Bir varmış, bir yokmuş… — "Once there was, once there wasn't…"
The copula in the past
Nouns and adjectives take -(y)di and -(y)miş too:
Hastaydım. — "I was ill." · Hastaymış. — "He's ill, apparently / he was ill, they say." Evdeydi. — "She was at home." · Para vardı. — "There was money."
Building more pasts
The two pasts stack on other tenses:
| form | example | gloss |
|---|---|---|
| -iyordu | geliyordum | I was coming (je venais) |
| aorist + -di | gelirdim | I used to come / I would come |
| -mişti | gelmiştim | I had come (j'étais venu) |
| -ecekti | gelecektim | I was going to come |
| -iyormuş | geliyormuş | he's coming, they say |
Çocukken her yaz köye giderdik. — "As children we used to go to the village every summer." Ben vardığımda tren kalkmıştı. — "When I arrived, the train had left."
Against Japanese, Korean and Georgian
Japanese and Korean report hearsay with separate words or endings added on top of the past (Japanese 〜そうだ, 〜らしい; Korean -대요 "they say"); Turkish builds it into the tense, so every past forces a choice. Georgian, also on the site, has a perfect series that likewise carries an "apparently" sense — the same idea in a language from another family. French has nothing grammatical for it: il serait parti in journalism comes closest.
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