Building Blocks: Understanding How Turkish Uses Suffixes to Make Meaning
Unlike English and most Romance languages, the Turkic language family is agglutinative, meaning that suffixes are added to word stems in order to mark both grammatical function and to form or extend meaning. The example below provides a relatively simple example of a Turkish sentence with various suffixes and other elements.
Üçüncü kata asansörle çıktılar.
Üç-üncü kat-a asansör-le çık-tı-lar
Three-ORD floor-DAT elevator-INS {go up-DEF.PST-3.PL}
“They took the elevator to the third floor.”
A note on reading this example: The first line (in bold) is the original sentence. The second and third lines are an inter-lingual gloss, and the final line is a natural translation.
Let’s walk through this example sentence word by word. Üçüncü (third) is formed by combining the determiner “Üç” (three) with the ordinal suffix +üncü.1
The second word is composed of the noun kat (floor [of a building]) and the dative suffix, which in this case is used to mark movement towards something/somewhere, reflected in the natural translation as the English preposition “to”.
The next word is formed by adding the instrumental postposition2 +İle to the noun asansör (elevator [loan from the French ascenseur]). The instrumental postposition fulfils the role of the English “with,” telling by what means an action was achieved.
The final word of the example sentence contains a verb conjugated for tense, aspect, and person. The verb stem çık- (to go; to leave), followed by the definite past (events known by the speaker to have happened) conjugation +tı and finally the plural suffix +lAr, showing that the subject is plural.
Through the use of agglutination, this information can be expressed in just four Turkish words, whereas in English seven words are needed. Let’s take another example which has recently made the rounds on social media:
‘Görüşemeyeceklermiş’ by Sergen Şehitoğlu, exhibited at Contemporary İstanbul’s 18th Annual Fair. The image is taken from Reddit.
Görüşemeyeceklermiş
Görüş-eme-yecek-ler-miş
see-NPOT-FUT-3PL-INDIR.PST
”(I heard) that they are not going to be able to see each other.”
Quite a clear example of how agglutination allows for a single Turkish word to communicate a dense amount of meaning! Some commentors have captioned the image “Türkçenin gücü” or ‘The power of the Turkish language’.
For speakers of non-agglutinative languages, the idea of appending suffixes to all types of words can be intimidating. However, with a bit of practice, the most common structures become second nature.
Notes
Footnotes
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In Turkish, suffixes must typically comply with a concept known as vowel harmony, affecting the spelling of the suffix with accordance to the preceeding vowel. ↩
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The postposition +İle can be combined with the word it modifies (under the rules of two-way vowel harmony), or may be spelled as a separate word, in which case it undergoes no vowel harmony changes and remains “ile”. ↩