My house, Ali's house

9.1 The possessive endings: evim, evin, evi

English says whose a thing is with a word in front of it: my house, your car. Turkish puts an ending on the thing itself: evim, "my house", araban, "your car". There is one for each person.

After a consonant, each ending but -lArI starts with a vowel of its own, chosen by harmony: ev-im, okul-um. After a vowel that vowel isn't needed: araba-m. The third person takes the buffer s after a vowel: araba-sı.

There are two endings for "your", as there are two words for "you": -(I)n for someone you call sen, and -(I)nIz for more than one person, or for one you call siz to be polite. The glosses write the second as your.PL.

-(s)I is "his", "her" and "its" at once. Turkish doesn't say which, and the glosses write its for all three: arabası is his car, her car or its car, and the sentence around it tells you whose.

A word that softens before a vowel softens before these endings too: kitap, "book", gives kitabım, kitabın, kitabı; çocuk, "child", gives çocuğum, çocuğu.

A few words lose the vowel of their last syllable when an ending that starts with a vowel comes after them: oğul, "son", becomes oğlum, "my son"; ağız, "mouth", ağzım; şehir, "city", şehrimiz, "our city". Dictionaries mark them.

The plural comes before the possessive: arkadaşlarım, "my friends", is arkadaş-lar-ım. "Their", -lArI, has a plural in it already, and Turkish doesn't put two together, so evleri is both "their house" and "their houses". It can also be ev-ler-i, "his houses". Again, the sentence around it decides.

9.2 Endings after the possessive

Endings come in a fixed order: the noun, then the plural, then the possessive, then the ending for in, from, to or the object.

After -(s)I, "his, her, its", each of these endings takes an n: evi becomes evinde, "in his house", and arabası becomes arabasına, "to her car". So the object ending there is -nI: evini, arabasını. The same n comes after -lArI, "their": evlerinde, "in their house". After the other possessives, nothing is added.

After a consonant, one word can come out two ways: evinde is ev-in-de, "in your house", or ev-i-nde, "in his house". In a sentence it is rarely in doubt.

9.3 The genitive: Ali'nin evi

To say whose with a name or a noun, as in "Ali's house", Turkish marks both words. The owner takes -(n)In, the genitive, which the glosses write GEN, and the thing owned takes -(s)I, "its": Ali'nin evi, word for word "Ali's his-house".

-(n)In is -in, -ın, -un or -ün after a consonant, with an n in front after a vowel. Names take it after an apostrophe.

One word goes its own way: su, "water", takes a y where others take n, and has suyun for "of the water" and suyu for "its water".

The owner doesn't have to be a person. Anything a thing belongs to, or is a part of, takes the genitive the same way.

The owner always comes first, as an adjective comes before its noun. A chain of owners reads from the start, each one owning the next: Ali'nin annesinin evi is Ali's mother's house. The word in the middle has both endings, -(s)I for being owned and -(n)In for owning, with the n that comes after -(s)I: anne-si-nin.

Case endings go after the -(s)I, with their n, as in the table above: Ali'nin evinde, "at Ali's house".

9.4 Compound nouns: Türk kahvesi, otobüs durağı

The genitive says whose: a particular owner, Ali or the house. When the first noun says instead what kind of thing the second is, it takes no ending, and the second keeps its -(s)I: Türk kahvesi, "Turkish coffee"; otobüs durağı, "bus stop". English often puts two nouns side by side with nothing to join them, as in "bus stop"; Turkish marks the second. The glosses write this -(s)I as CMP, for compound.

Signs, maps and menus are full of compounds: streets, as Atatürk Caddesi, "Atatürk Avenue"; schools, banks and companies; and dishes, as mercimek çorbası, "lentil soup", from çorba, "soup".

Ali'nin kahvesi is Ali's coffee, his cup of it. Türk kahvesi is a kind of coffee, and no Turk in particular owns it.

A compound is not an adjective and its noun. Türkçe öğretmeni is a teacher of Turkish; Türk öğretmen, with no ending, is a teacher who is Turkish, with Türk used as an adjective.

When a compound takes a possessive, the possessive takes the place of its -(s)I: doğum günü, "birthday", doğum günüm, "my birthday". A case ending goes after the -(s)I with an n, as after any -(s)I: otobüs durağında, "at the bus stop".

9.5 benim, senin: my, your

The pronouns have genitives too, which do the work of English's "my", "your" and the rest.

benim and bizim end in -im, not the -in the rule would give. o takes an n, as it does before -(y)I, and so do bu and şu: onun, bunun, şunun.

The possessive ending is still needed after them: benim evim, "my house", not benim ev. Everyday speech does drop it after bizim, as in bizim ev, "our house", but the full form is never wrong. And since the ending already says whose, benim and the rest are left out unless they are stressed: evim is "my house", and benim evim is "my house", mine and not someone else's. People do often say Benim adım ... when they give their name.

Standing on its own after a noun, a genitive says "mine", "yours", "Ayşe's":

9.6 Reading a long word

The endings of a noun always come in the same order: the noun, the plural, the possessive, and last the ending that gives the word its place in the sentence. So a long word is read from its start, one piece at a time: what it is, how many, whose, and what it is doing.

And then the thing they own, with its own -(s)I and the ending after it: arkadaşlarımızın evinde, "at our friends' house".

A word with a possessive ending is always a particular one, so as an object it always takes -(y)I: kitaplarımı, never kitaplarım, when it is what the verb acts on.