Lesson 17 — Bu meşe kurutulmamış! Oak nobody dried

1çalar saat: the aorist in front of a noun

Open TDK’s dictionary at sıfat-fiil, “participle”, and you’ll find seven endings. You know four: -⁠an, -⁠acak and -⁠dık from Lesson 12, -⁠mış from Lesson 14. Today it’s the last three, -⁠r, -⁠maz and -⁠ası, and then the list is done. We’ll start with what wakes you up: çalar saat, an alarm clock, literally “a ringing clock”.

That -⁠ar is Course 1 Lesson 21’s aorist: Saat çalar, “the clock rings”. It’s just left the end of the sentence and moved in front of a noun. Which ending to use, -⁠ar, -⁠ır or a bare -⁠r, you know already: whatever that verb takes in the aorist. TDK’s dictionary gives these pairs entries of their own, and here are a few worth having:

Read these out loud:

Sometimes the noun leaves altogether and one word stays, as with içecekler and yiyecek in Lesson 12. yazar is a writer, someone who writes. okur is a reader. gelir is income, what comes in, and gider is outgoings, what goes. And döner: the thing that turns. You’ve very likely eaten it.

So how’s this different from -⁠an? çalan telefon is a phone that’s ringing. çalar saat is an alarm clock, and it’s still one when it’s silent. TDK even explains it with -⁠an: istenilen zamanda çalan saat, “a clock that rings at the time you want”. Here -⁠ar isn’t about a moment; it’s about what kind of thing this is. Learn these pairs whole, and for a “that does” of your own you’ve still got -⁠an.

2tükenmez kalem: the pen that doesn’t run out

You’ve met -⁠maz before: in Course 1’s Lesson 21 it was the aorist’s “no”, içmez, in this course’s Lesson 10 it was geç kalınmaz, and last lesson it was in duyar duymaz. Put it in front of a noun and you’ve got a thing that doesn’t do that. tükenmek is “to run out”, and tükenmez kalem is a ballpoint, literally “a pen that doesn’t run out”. Anyone who’s ever bought one knows that’s an exaggeration.

Now for the most useful bit. Put -⁠maz on Lesson 10’s passive: unut, unutul, unutulmaz. Word for word it’s “that isn’t forgotten”; in English, plain “unforgettable”. Plenty of other “un-…-able” words come out the same way. Here’s unutulmaz with three more:

Read these out loud. The last one goes for this lesson too:

The trap is the one -⁠mış set in Lesson 14: one form, and the noun after it decides. With a noun, it’s a participle. If -⁠maz ends the sentence, it’s the aorist. Only words like kaçınılmaz stay what they are even there: “unavoidable”. Here’s the pair with çıkmaz:

3kurutulmuş meşe: -⁠mış and -⁠mamış

You met the -⁠mış participle in Lesson 14: yıkılmış cumba, kırılmış bardak. Today it gets a negative: -⁠ma before the -⁠mış. TDK’s own example is just that: gelişmemiş ülke, a country that hasn’t developed. meşe is oak; kurutulmuş meşe is oak that’s been dried, kurutulmamış meşe oak that hasn’t. We’ll take that long word apart in section 6.

Some of these participles have become ordinary words. You’ve known dolmuş since Course 1’s Lesson 11: a shared minibus, literally “filled up”. And menus are full of them:

Now a difference that’s easy to miss. kurumuş is “dried up”, by itself. kurutulmuş is “dried”, by someone:

And Lesson 14’s trap again. At the end of a sentence it’s Course 1 Lesson 18’s -⁠mış, “it turns out”. In front of a noun it’s the participle:

4kahrolası and gidesim var: -⁠ası, a curse and a wish

The last ending is -⁠ası or -⁠esi: the last vowel picks which, as with -⁠lar / -⁠ler, and after a vowel it takes the buffer y. It’s had an odd life. In the Turkish of 13th- to 15th-century Anatolia it simply meant “that will be”, and today that’s usually -⁠acak’s job. What’s left is something else: a curse and a wish.

The curse first. TDK’s dictionary explains kahrolası with two more of the same, yok olası, perişan olası, “may it vanish, may it come to ruin”, and it’s said of a person, a thing or a state of affairs. It’s strong stuff, so don’t try it in a meeting. A printer can take it, though:

The wish is more fun. Add a possessive ending to -⁠ası, then var, yok or geldi, and here it’s “I feel like it”:

Two more traces. olası is “possible”, by now an ordinary word: olası bir sorun, “a possible problem”. And here’s -⁠ası on a passive, where it’s what you’d want: sevilesi, easy to love, yaşanılası bir şehir, a city you’d want to live in.

5All seven side by side

That’s TDK’s whole list, with examples you’ve already seen:

The first four you build yourself. -⁠r in this lesson means ready-made pairs, and -⁠ası a curse and a wish. -⁠maz sits between: ready-made pairs, and your own unutulmaz and inanılmaz.

6yaptırıldı: voice on voice

In Lesson 10 the four voices stood side by side, each on its own: reciprocal, reflexive, causative, passive. But one verb can take several, and in every example here they come in the same order: first the reciprocal or reflexive, then the causative, and the passive last. After them it’s business as usual: the negative, the tense, the person. Here’s the word from the lesson’s title:

The passive’s ending is chosen as it was in Lesson 10: look at how whatever comes before it ends. Now the pairs. Causative and passive. Lesson 9’s yaptırmak gives yaptırıldı. Someone had it done, and the sentence doesn’t say who:

söndürmek, “to put out” (hence last lesson’s söndürücü), and çıkarmak work the same way, only here it’s plain “put out” and “moved”:

Compare these two. yıkıldı is “it was pulled down”, or even “it came down by itself”. yıktırıldı is “it was pulled down because someone had it done”:

Reciprocal and passive. görüşmek is “to discuss”, görüşülecek “will be discussed”. tartışmak is “to argue”, tartışıldı “it was argued over”:

And you’ll hear Anlaşıldı at the end of a conversation: “Understood”. Same shape, though you can’t hear any “each other” in it now:

Reciprocal and causative. Getting people to do something with each other: tanışmak is “to meet”, tanıştırmak “to introduce”. barışmak is “to make up”, barıştırmak “to reconcile”:

Reflexive and passive. In Lesson 6 the hamamcı told Kerem soyunursunuz. For nobody in particular, people in general, like Lesson 10’s geç kalınmaz, it’s soyunulur:

And all three at once. tanış, tanıştır, tanıştırıl. Or Lesson 6’s sevinmek: sevin, sevindir, sevindiril:

Nobody expects verbs this long from you on the spot. You need to be able to read them, and they read from the inside out: the stem, then one ending after another. If tanıştırılacak tripped you up, that’s normal: take it apart and say it out loud.

8Dialogue: what the oak says

Early September, a Monday, eight in the morning, in the street by number 5. Cars aren’t allowed here from nine, so the kamyon, the lorry, has come early. On it, at last, are the supports Tolga Bey promised in March. Zehra Hanım has brought along the usta to look at them, the one who opened up Orhan Bey’s wall in Lesson 5.

Kurutulmuş meşe on the invoice is a participle; the usta’s Bu meşe kurutulmamış! is a whole sentence: section 3’s trap. Zehra Hanım’s görüşülecek ends a sentence, and his stands in front of bir şey, which makes it a participle. yıktırıldı is the yıktırdı of Lessons 12 and 16, only he names no name. Eski ağaç atılmaz sounds like Lesson 10’s Bu ofiste geç kalınmaz: it isn’t done. And he still works as he did in Lesson 5: Sökerken kırmayacağız, “We won’t break it taking it out.”

9Reading

A şantiye defteri is a site log: a book where what’s been done gets written down, day by day. The first page here is Zehra Hanım’s, and then Tolga Bey and Kerem write in turn. Zehra Hanım reads it and answers in the margin. The entries are short and nearly all in the passive: who did it doesn’t matter here. The last entry has a familiar pair in a new job: görsün diye. You know the parts: Course 1 Lesson 10’s -⁠sın, “let”, and its Lesson 19’s diye, which follows someone’s words. They stood side by side in this course’s Lesson 4, in olsun diye yazsaydım, and there they were words in quotation marks. Here there are none, and together it’s “so that”:

Read it through; open a translation only where you’re stuck.

çevrildi is from Course 1 Lesson 21’s çevirmek: in the passive the i drops out. payandalar eskiydi is Defne’s answer from last lesson, now with the proof. And Beş numaranın cumbasında oturan kız benim, “The girl sitting in number 5’s cumba is me”, Nevin Hanım wrote in Lesson 12. Now you know who looked at the street from that cumba before her.

10The lesson’s new words

These are the words the lesson brought in for the first time, in the order you met them. Forms of verbs you know, like kurutulmuş or görüşülecek, aren’t here: you can build those yourself. Nor are the historical zira and Nizamname: they stayed in “Türkiye up close”.

This lesson’s words as flashcards →

11Say it yourself

Out loud first, then the answer. For each one, ask yourself: which of the seven participles is it? Or how many voices are in the verb? 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.