Lessons · 2 of 18

Pronouns and the simple past

Six pronouns, six endings — and your first real sentences.

Two ingredients unlock your first sentences: the six pronouns, and one past tense. Here are the pronouns —

• men — I
• sen — you (one person)
• ol — he, she, or it (one word does all three)
• biz — we
• siz — you all, or one person politely
• ala — they

They bend into different shapes for "my", "to me", "at me" and so on — the pronouns bank lays all of that out — but the plain forms above are all this lesson needs.

The simple past

Take a verb's stem, add dı (its vowel matching the stem, as lesson 1 promised), then add a personal ending. With bar — the stem of "to go" — the whole set looks like this:

• men bardım — I went
• sen bardıng — you went
• ol bardı — he/she/it went
• biz bardık — we went
• siz bardığız — you all went
• ala bardıla — they went

Look at what comes after bardı each time: -m for I, -ñ for you, nothing at all for he/she/it, -q for we, -ğız for you all, -la for they. Karachay has two sets of person endings, and this is the first of them — call it the past set. It turns up in the past tense, in the if-forms of lesson 9, and on the helper words edi and ese. The other set, the present set, arrives in lesson 3; the two differ in five of their six endings, so it is worth knowing from the start that there are two rather than meeting the second as an exception.

One more habit worth forming early: the pronoun is optional. The ending already says who did it, so bardım alone is a complete sentence — "I went." Speakers add men for emphasis, the way English might stress the word "I".

A front-vowel stem, for your ear: kel ("come") gives keldim, kelding, keldi — same endings, front vowels throughout.