Lessons · 17 of 18

What Karachay doesn't have

Four endings every neighbouring language has and this one doesn't — and what it says instead.

Most of a language is what it has. This short lesson is about four things Karachay-Balkar doesn't have — endings that its neighbours all carry, that a learner coming from Turkish, Kazakh or Tatar will reach for without thinking, and that will not be understood here. Each one is worth learning as a hole, because the workaround is a construction you already know.

1. There is no "my going comes to me"

Kazakh, Kyrgyz and Tatar all say "I want to go" with a phrase that means, word for word, my going comes — barğım keledi and its relatives. It is one of the most recognisable shapes in the family, and Karachay does not use it. We searched every spelling of it across everything we have and found none.

What Karachay says instead is the plainest thing possible: the dictionary form of the verb, then a verb of wanting.

• barırğa izleyme — I want to go
• barırğa süyeme — I'd like to go

The 1990 phrasebook renders every single one of its dozen "I want…" sentences this way. If you have been building the other shape in your head, drop it.

2. There is no must-ending

Turkish has -malı, and its cousins have their own versions: one ending glued to the verb that means "must". Karachay has no such ending. Necessity here is always a separate word, and you met it in lesson 10:

• menge barırğa kerekdi — I need to go
• barırğa kerekme — I need to go (the same, said the other way)

Both are correct and both are ordinary. In the first the person sits on the "to me"; in the second it sits on kerek itself. The verb never changes either way — which is the whole point.

3. mak is not an infinitive

In Turkish, -mak is the dictionary ending: gitmek, yapmak. A learner will see barmak in a Karachay text and read it as "to go". It isn't. Every word of that shape in the language is a frozen noun with a life of its own:

• barmak — a finger
• ötmek — bread

The Karachay infinitive is the one you have used since lesson 4: barırğa, kelirge, eterge. Its negative is barmazğa, "not to go" — so "I want not to go" is barmazğa izleyme.

4. There is no "I didn't see it" ending

Turkish marks hearsay on the verb itself, with -mış. Learners arrive expecting Karachay to do the same, and older descriptions of this site said it did — we taught the two pasts as a witnessed/unwitnessed pair until we went looking for a grammar that agreed and could not find one.

What Karachay has is lesson 8's ordinary pair: a definite past and a perfect. Speakers really do lean on barğandı for what they only heard about — but that follows from what a perfect is, not from an ending that means "so I'm told". If you want to say outright that you are guessing, the language makes you say so in words: barğan bolur, "he must have gone".