Turkish Grammar
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Chapter 2: Grammar
This chapter will cover cases and sentence formation. It will also touch on the basics of verb mechanics. What you will learn is all the things you will need to form a full sentence in Turkish.
Cases
There are 7 case declensions in Turkish. Nominative, which typically has no ending, can have one in the case of the verb "to be". This usually deals with the sublject of the sentence. Accusative usually refers to the direct object, and Dative usually refers to the indirect object. Because of this, these three cases will be covered together.
The Genitive case is very important in Turkish, it's the case which shows the possession of someone or something. it can be adjusted heavily to fit the context of a sentence, as can the Locative and Ablative cases, which describe place and motion.
Finally is the Instrumental case, which showcases an object to be used, or a person as an accessory to something.
Agglutination
All 7 cases have their own unique agglutinatives. All but Genitive are entirely dependent on vowel harmony. They can't all always stack on one another, but can be stacked upon the previously discussed agglutinatives. Words typically don't transcend case, but may in some cases. This may be supplemented with an apostrophe.
Sentence structure
Turkish sentence structure is typically subject, object, verb. Though, because of agglutination, it is possible to create full sentences without the need for a subject at all, or a verb for that matter. The nominative ending can replace olmak for "to be". As seen before, "Mutluyum" can be a sentence of its own, which is an adjective with a nominative ending.
These rules work for all dialects of Turkish, and are similar to ones of other Turkic Languages.
Case Endings
| Case | Ending |
|---|---|
| Nominative | none/-yim/-sin |
| Accusative | -i |
| Dative | -a/-e |
| Genitive | -m/-n |
| Ablative | -dan/-den |
| Locative | -da/-de |
| Instrumental | -la/-le |
These are the 7 case endings. We will go into more depth about how they work later. But, note the "i" and the "a/e" vowel harmony pairings.
Cappadocia, Nevşehir