Turkish Lesson 7 - Intro to Verbs
Turkish is an agglutinative language, but this is most obviously seen in its verbs as there are a number of infixes and suffixes that we can use with them. These infixes and suffixes can be for tense, aspect, person, etc.
In this lesson, we will be starting with the most common present tense, şimdiki zaman, or the present continuous tense.
The present continuous tense is used like this:
Ne yapıyorsun? - ‘What are you reading’, where ‘ne’ means ‘what’ and ‘yapıyorsun’ is the verb ‘yapmak’, which means ‘to do’, in its present continuous form.
A possible reply is “kitap okuyorum”, where ‘kitap’ means ‘book’ and ‘okuyorum’ is the verb ‘okumak’, which means ‘to read’, in its present continuous form.
Conjugating a verb in the present continuous tense can be done as follows:
Take the verb in its infinitive form (the basic form of a verb that doesn’t assign it a specific tense or subject), which can be recognised by the ending mak/mek. The ending is either ‘-mek’ or ‘-mak’ based on major vowel harmony.
Get rid of the ending, and replace it with iyor/ıyor/uyor/üyor (e, i = iyor, a, ı = ıyor, o, u = uyor, ö, ü = üyor). The ‘o’ in iyor does not change.
Refer to Lesson 3 for the endings (um, sun, etc) in the “Present Tense ‘to be’” table, and add them to the verb. The only exception is third person, which does not require an ending when it’s singular and uses the ending ‘-lar/ler’ when it’s plural. These endings always use the vowel ‘u’ for the sake of vowel harmony, as the vowel before it would be the ‘o’ in ‘iyor’.
Basically: (verb without mak/mek) + (iyor, according to vowel harmony) + (personal ending)
If you go back to the initial example, you will not notice that the word ‘yapıyorsun’ consists of ‘yap’, ‘-ıyor’ and the second person singular ending ‘-sun’ and that the word ‘okuyorum’ works the same way, but with the first person singular ending, ‘um’.
Here’s an example using the verb ‘yazmak’, which means ‘to write’:
There may be some exceptions that we will touch upon later, but for now, try conjugating some verbs on your own, and ask us if you have any questions!
