Lessons · 13 of 18

Words that grow

Number, owner, and direction stack onto one word, in one fixed order — a whole phrase in a single word.

Here is the deepest habit of the language, and the last three lessons have been quietly building up to it: endings stack. One word grows, piece by piece, until it says what English needs a whole phrase for — and the pieces always come in the same order: how many, then whose, then which direction.

• üy — house
• üy·le — houses
• üy·ler·im — my houses
• üy·ler·im·de — in my houses

Read the last one from left to right and it tells its own story: house — more than one — mine — inside. Because the order is fixed, there is nothing to decide; you only choose which slots to fill. A grand old word like atalarıbız ("our forefathers") is the same machine: father, plural, ours.

Two smaller pieces play in the same space. The ending ça means "like" — it bla kiştikça "like cat and dog", straight from a proverb — and a few little words follow the noun instead of attaching: atam bla "with my father", anam üçün "for my mother", kökge deri "up to the sky."

Two more sit in the same slot as ça, and neither is a case even though it looks like one. lay means "as it is, while it is" — issiley "while it's hot", sabiyley "as a child". It takes nothing at all — no owner, no plural, and not even a pronoun in front. One bare word covers "as a child", "when I was a child" and "when you were a child", and the rest of the sentence says which.

And degi turns "in the house" into "the one in the house": üyde becomes üydegi. That one stacks happily on an owner — içindegi "the one inside it" — and you have met it already without noticing, because üydegi is a dictionary word in its own right: the household, the ones in the house.