Hello, everyone! Earlier we had another lesson related to the case system with a focus on location. This week, we are going to learn what cases are more in depth.
Cases concern and change nouns, not verbs. Glossary of Linguistics Terms defines a case as “a grammatical category determined by the syntactic or semantic function of a noun or pronoun.” But that just complicated the matters. So in layman’s terms, we can say that a case changes or inflects (changes) a noun or pronoun because of the noun’s function or place in a sentence. If none of the languages you speak has cases and it is your first encounter with such a concept, that might sound confusing, but don’t worry! Examples exist for a reason.
So let’s take the word “ev” (house).
If we use this as a subject like in the sentence “The house is big.”, we stick to the form we see in the dictionary and hear being said as an individual word. It is the version that exists in the minds of native speakers without an assigned function. And a sentence where this form is used would have the word as a noun as in “Ev çöküyor.” (The house is collapsing.)
However if the same word were used as an object like in “I’m buying the house.”, the word “ev” changes form and turns into “evi” as the sentence “Evi satın alıyorum.” shows.
So now that we know what a case is, we can talk about cases in Turkish. In Turkish, we have five cases (some books may say more but that’s what every native speaker learns at school) and only nouns are inflected by the cases (in contrast to other languages which inflect adjectives and determines as well e.g. German, Slavic languages, Armenian, Greek etc.)
5 Turkish cases are as follows:
Nominative (no suffix - the noun form)
Accusative (-i, - ı, - u, - ü, - yi, -yı, yu, -yü suffixes - the direct object form)
Dative (-a, - e, - ya, - ye suffixes - the indirect object form)
Locative (-de, -da, -te, -ta - the location and time form)
Ablative (-den, -dan, -ten, -tan - the departure or source form)
Today we will be learning the ones in bold.
THE NOMINATIVE CASE (İSMİN YALIN HALİ)
You already know one of these cases as it is the nominative or as we call in Turkish “ismin yalın hali” (the plain version of the noun). It is the uninflected version of the noun, and every word you learn is in this case. Examples are as follows: kapı (door), portakal (orange), sevgi (love), uyku (sleep) etc.
The nominative is used when the noun is a subject. Çocuk kapıyı açıyor. (The child is opening the door.)
When it is used as a nominal predicate.This sounds different but it just means, instead of a verb a noun is used because Turkish doesn’t use the verb “to be”. Onun kızı öğretmen. (Her/his daughter is a teacher.)
When the object of the sentence is indefinite. (In English, to serve the same purpose “some” or “a” is used.) Bana kitap veriyor. (She/he is giving me a/some book.) If we used a case here, it would mean we are talking about a specific book, not a random one.
Before some postpositions gibi (like), için(for), ile (with), kadar (as… as) ev gibi (like a house), ev için (for the house), ev ile (with the house), ev kadar (as much as the house) However I specifically recommend that you don’t try to memorize these postpositions as long as the language you speak doesn’t use a different case for them, they should appear pretty natural in their nominative form for speakers of languages without cases.
THE LOCATIVE CASE (İSMİN BULUNMA HALİ)
You know this case and that it is used to indicate location from Lesson 5 as well. If you don’t remember or want to check it you can click the link.The name of this case makes sense both in English and Turkish, because its function is already specified in the name. Locative is all about locations, in Turkish we call it “the state of being found/present of the noun” (which sounds just super duper weird in English)
This case expresses location in time and space. And is formed by adding “-de”, “-da”, “-te”, “-ta” to the noun in accordance with the vowel harmony and “consonant hardening” ( if a word ends in f, s, t, k, ç, ş, h, p instead of “-de”, - “da” used their t counterparts.) How it conforms to these rules is explained in Lesson 5.
Koltukta - on the couch/sofa
Aynı şehirde yaşıyoruz. (We live in the same city.)
Şehir - the city şehirde - in the city
Bu günlerde her şey çok pahalı. (Everything is too expensive these days.)
However we still use the locative because we are talking about the location in time. If we used it in the nominative it would be a subject like in the sentence “These days are hot.”
Also some verbs require the locative case but this isn’t an arbitrary requirement, they require the locative because these verbs carry meanings related to location or time.
These are oturmak (to sit), durmak (stop),yaşamak (to live), bulunmak (to be found/present), kalmak (to stay)
İstanbul'da yaşıyorum. (I live in Istanbul.)
Koltukta oturuyor. (She/he sits on the sofa.)
Arkadaşında kalıyor. [She/he is staying at her/his friend’s (place).]
Congratulations, you just learned two cases! It is a good subject for you to practice both the cases and the vowel harmony because cases make heavy use of vowel harmony. Don’t hesitate to ask us any questions you have, and have a nice day!
