Lesson 19 — Kim besliyor? Seen or heard

1Seen or heard: -dı and -mış side by side

Last lesson brought in -mış, with a promise: the full comparison with -dı comes next time. This is next time. And the whole comparison comes down to one question: were you there?

Turkish school grammars name the two tenses for exactly that. -dı is görülen geçmiş, “the seen past”. -mış is öğrenilen geçmiş, “the learned past”. You don’t need the names, but the whole rule is in them: one you saw for yourself, the other you found out — from someone, or from the traces.

Take one event and two people telling it. Deniz saw a cat at his door this morning, with his own eyes. Ayşe only knows because he told her. Listen to how each of them puts it:

Which gives you the rule for passing news on: somebody else’s -dı becomes your -mış. The event is theirs; all you know is that you were told.

And what you’re sure of, even if you didn’t see it? Dates, family history, things everybody knows — that’s -dı. You didn’t watch your grandmother being born, but you know the year for certain.

About yourself it’s -dı too: what you did, you know. Except for Lesson 18’s two cases: when it surprises you, and when you did it without noticing.

One last thing. -mış from the traces is a guess, and a guess can be wrong. Galiba biri kediye süt vermiş — “looks like somebody’s given the cat some milk”. Looks like. Hold on to that sentence: today’s story is going to need it.

2Kalkıp baktım: one thing, then the next

In any story one action hooks on to the next: got up and opened the window, came in and sat down. You can say both verbs in full: kalktım ve açtım. Or, the way Turks usually do, shorter: kalkıp açtım. -(y)ıp means “did that — and then”.

The stem, -ıp, and that’s it. Four teams: -ıp, -ip, -up, -üp. After a vowel, a glue y — Lesson 16’s. And -ıp has no person and no tense at all: it borrows both from the last verb. Kapıyı açıp baktım is “I opened the door and looked”, and both times it’s “I”, both times it’s the past.

The tense comes from the last verb as well — whichever one it is:

The sounds behave the way you’re used to by now. Gitmek gives gidip — the t turns into d, as in gidiyorum. Etmek gives edip. Yemek gives yiyip, like Lesson 17’s yiyecek. Demek is the one stubborn exception: deyip, keeping its e. That’s how TDK spells it, and plenty of Turks trip over it too.

With Lesson 10’s imperative and “let’s” you get what might be the most Turkish phrases there are. Gidip bakayım — “let me go and have a look”. Oturup konuşalım — “let’s sit down and talk”.

Today it’s the positive only. “Without doing” has forms of its own, -mayıp and -madan, and they’re waiting for you in Lesson 24.

3“Ben gördüm!” diye bağırdı: somebody’s words, word for word

All last lesson we were passing things on in -mış. But sometimes you want someone’s words exactly as they were said: who shouted what, who asked what. For that you need quotation marks and one small word — diye.

Quotation marks in Turkish are tırnak işareti, literally “the fingernail mark”: tırnak is a nail — or, on a cat, a claw. They sit up high, like this: “Geldim!”

The order goes: who — the words in quotation marks — diye — and a verb that says how they were said.

Diye comes from demek, “to say”; the e turns to i before the y, as in diyor. Word for word, diye is “saying”. “Saying ‘I saw it!’, Efe shouted.” Odd in English, but that’s how Turkish does it: diye labels the words “these were said”, and the verb after it tells you how — shouted, asked, whispered, thought.

With dedi — “said” — itself, you don’t need diye: dedi already means “said”.

And here’s where diye meets the first section. Inside the quotation marks the words stay exactly as they were said: the “I”, the tense, all of it theirs. Deniz was talking about himself, so the quote says gördüm. To tell it in your own words, reach for -mış. Two ways to pass news on: word for word with diye, or in your own words with -mış.

That’s how any dialogue turns into a story:

5Dialogue: the telephone game

Saturday, at Sevim teyze’s. The children were playing kulaktan kulağa — “from ear to ear”, the telephone game. Ayşe and Can played too. The sentence didn’t make it to the end, and now, on the stairs, they’re working out whose fault that was.

Bozmak is “to break, to ruin”. Cümle is “a sentence”. Fısıldamak is “to whisper”. Watch who knows what. Ayşe passes on her own words with dedim and fısıldadım — she did that herself. What Ali whispered to Efe, nobody heard, so Can asks ne demiş. And at the end Efe shouts in -mış — kedi olmuş — because he’s passing on what he heard, too. The quotation marks keep his words exactly as he said them.

6Reading

Remember the plate that’s been going up and down the stairs since Lesson 6? Last lesson it landed with Deniz again, full of börek. Today it goes back upstairs — and somebody new turns up on the stairs.

Tekir is a grey, striped cat — a tabby. Paspas is a doormat. Kap is any dish or container: a bowl, a plate, a tub. Beslemek is “to feed” (an animal), “to keep”. Paşa, Bulut and Aslan are ordinary cat names: “the pasha”, “cloud”, “lion”. And look what happened to the guess from the first section: galiba… vermiş — and wrong! Nobody gave it milk. -mış from the traces is only a guess. At the end it’s meğer vermemiş: the truth has come out.

7The lesson’s new words

Everything new from today, in the order it turned up. The -ıp forms aren’t here — you build those yourself. Nor are the proverbs: they’re taken whole, and ciğer and pis live in just the one. The cat’s names didn’t make it either: it hasn’t got one yet.

8Say it yourself

Out loud first, then check. Missed? Good — that’s how it sticks. Peeking first just gives away the useful part.

9Check yourself

Six items. A miss shows you the right answer, so getting it wrong here is useful too.

10Homework

All of it out loud. Today’s grammar is a storyteller’s grammar, so tell stories.