Lesson 2 — Anlaştık! Football, and each other

1Gol! The words of a match

In Course 1’s Lesson 24 you asked Hangi takımı tutuyorsun?, and you know takım, saha, hakem, taraftar and gol atmak. Today it’s the match itself: who stands where, how long it lasts and how it ends. In Türkiye this isn’t a niche for fans: last night’s match comes up in taxis, in lifts and at meetings while everyone waits for the boss. Start with the pitch:

Kale is also “a fortress”, and the kaleci is the one who holds it, with Lesson 10’s -⁠ci, as in gazeteci. In front of him are the defans, in the middle the orta saha, up front the forvet. They came from English, and the Turkish dictionary offers its own, savunma and ileri uç, but these are the ones you’ll hear in the stands. Cover the translations and test yourself:

And how it ended. You know kazanmak from Lesson 4 and kaybetmek from Lesson 24; the sports news loves one more pair: yenmek, “to beat someone”, with the accusative, and yenilmek, “to lose to someone”, with the dative. Yenilmek is built the way Turkish builds its passive; we’ll get to that later, so for now take the word whole:

Galibiyet is a win, yenilgi a defeat. Newspapers often write mağlubiyet for yenilgi, an Arabic word: recognise it, and say yenilgi yourself. That’s the one TDK’s dictionary points you to.

2The rules of the game: -⁠malı on the pitch

First, a look back at Lesson 1 — through football. The rules of the game are exactly what that lesson was about: what a player should do (-⁠malı), what he has no choice about (zorunda), and what he’s allowed to do (Lesson 21’s -⁠abilir).

The most mysterious rule is ofsayt, offside. In short: when a team-mate plays the pass, an attacker in the other side’s half needs at least two of its players to be no further from their goal than he is — usually the goalkeeper and a defender. If only the keeper is left in front of him: ofsayt. You now know more than half the stadium, and you have something to argue about:

3Tanıştık: “each other” in one ending

You’ve been saying it since Course 1’s first lesson: Görüşürüz!, “see you”. Now take it apart: gör is “see”, -⁠üş is “each other”, -⁠ür-üz is “we” in the aorist. Word for word: “we’ll see each other”. That -⁠üş is today’s grammar.

In Turkish it’s called işteş çatı. Don’t let it scare you: TDK’s dictionary gives işteş as “a partner in a shared job”, and çatı, the “voice”, is the same word as last lesson’s “roof”. The ending is -⁠ış, -⁠iş, -⁠uş or -⁠üş, by the four teams, like Lesson 2’s mı. After a vowel, a bare -⁠ş is enough:

You know buluşmak from Lesson 11 and görüşmek from Lesson 25: they were like this all along. And anlaşmak has travelled furthest from anlamak: “understand each other” is “agree”. Hence Anlaştık!, “it’s a deal!”

Who with is told by Lesson 12’s -⁠la. And the verb takes no object: the “each other” is already inside it. That’s the trap if you think in English, where you “met Kerem”: Kerem’i tanıyorum is “I know Kerem”, but “I met Kerem” is Kerem’le tanıştım, “I got acquainted with Kerem”:

From there it’s an ordinary verb: any tense, the negative, the question, -⁠malı — everything where it always is:

And don’t mix it up with Lesson 23. There, bakış and gülüş are nouns, “a look” and “a smile”: nothing after the -⁠ış, or a case. Here, bakışmak is a verb, and a tense and a person follow the -⁠ış: bakıştık. Ciddi bir bakış is a serious look; Bakıştık is “we looked at each other”.

4Birbirimize: “each other” as a word

Not every verb has an -⁠ış. For the rest there’s the word birbiri, “one another”, from bir and bir. You add a possessive — whose “each other”: ours, yours or theirs — and the case the verb asks for:

The case is the one the verb takes anyway: bakmak asks for the dative (bana bak), so birbirimize baktık; sevmek the accusative, so birbirlerini. In the third person you’ll also hear birbirini, with no -⁠ler.

Where a verb has both, they can mean different things, and anlamak is the best example. Birbirimizi anlıyoruz: we understand each other, the words and the thinking. Anlaşıyoruz: we get on, we’ve agreed. You can understand each other perfectly and still not agree.

5Gülüştüler: all at once

-⁠ış has a second job, and TDK names it right beside the first: an action done “mutually or together”. Sometimes it isn’t “each other” but “all together, at once, as a crowd”. The test is easy: try adding “all at once” in your head:

In bağrışmak a vowel has dropped out of bağır — as burun becomes burnum: before an ending’s vowel, the second syllable squeezes up.

One last thing: not every -⁠ış can still be heard. Konuşmak, çalışmak, alışmak, yakışmak you learnt in Course 1 as ordinary words, and that’s what they stay — much as nobody hears “stand” and “under” in “understand”.

6Mesajlaşalım: “with each other”, from a noun

From a noun, “with each other” is built with -⁠laş / -⁠leş, by the two teams. A letter — write to each other; a message — text each other. There are so many that people make new ones as they go:

Two words from this family are especially handy at work. Sözleşmek is from söz, “word”: “to give each other your word”, and more often “to arrange to meet”. Karşılaşmak is from karşı, “opposite”: to “run into” someone in the street, or to “meet” on the pitch:

And Lesson 22’s -⁠ma turns these verbs into nouns, some of which you’ll meet in any office. Lesson 23’s iş görüşmesi is a görüşme: a meeting where you and they look each other over. Anlaşma is an agreement, sözleşme a contract, karşılaşma a meeting of two teams — a match, as the news calls it:

And, to recognise: -⁠laş has a second job with no “each other” in it at all. After an adjective it means “become”: güzel — güzelleşmek, “get lovelier”, zor — zorlaşmak, “get harder”. Telling them apart is easy: an adjective has no “each other”.

8Dialogue: the window that won’t be

Remember the house in Üsküdar from Lesson 1? The owner wanted a big window onto the street, and the board won’t allow one. Today Kerem and Defne go to tell him “no”. The owner is Orhan Bey, and there’s a football scarf on his wall.

Count the “each other”s: görüşüyoruz, yazıştık, selamlaşmak, kucaklaştı, bağrıştı — that one’s “all at once” — Anlaştık and tokalaşalım, “let’s shake hands”, from toka, a handshake. And listen to how they talk. In front of a client Kerem calls his colleague Defne Hanım; in a whisper he says sen, and Defne answers in kind: Sus! And if you remember why Can didn’t get the job in Course 1’s last lesson, none of this will surprise you: football settled it again.

9Reading

Every year the office plays football against the engineers who work on its sites. On Monday Kerem sent everyone an e-mail about the match. Read it the way you’d read work e-mail: the whole thing first, and open a translation only where you’re stuck.

A halı saha is literally a “carpet pitch”: a small pitch with artificial turf, fenced in with netting. Kenar is an edge, as in Lesson 22’s cam kenarı. Kalemden is “out of my goal”, kale with a possessive and the ablative — not kalem, a pen. And Not at the end is Lesson 25’s P.S., as in Zeynep’s letter.

10The lesson’s new words

These are the words the lesson brought in for the first time. Takım, saha, hakem, taraftar, buluşmak and görüşmek you know from Course 1, and Lesson 13’s oyuncu is a player as well as an actor. The -⁠ış and -⁠laş forms the lesson only showed in passing aren’t here.

This lesson’s words as flashcards →

11Say it yourself

Out loud first, then the answer. Each one has an “each other” in it, and every time an ending says it. Getting it wrong and then checking is exactly what this is for.

12Check yourself

Six items. A miss shows you the right answer straight away, and why.

13Homework

Two to say aloud, three to write. Write by hand or in your phone’s notes, then read it aloud: the ear finds what the eye let through.