"Kaptanın bir çocuğu var."
Translation:The captain has a child.
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This is almost like Japanese. In Japanese, you write "As for the captain, a child exists." To mean the captain has a child.
I feel like this is why some linguists subscribe to the, apparently highly controversial and largely discredited, altaic hypthoesis, which puts Japanese, Korean, and Turkish (among others) into one common language family. It's neat to see what similarities there are between these languages even if they don't share a common ancestor. Thanks for pointing it out! :)
I'm going to a Turkish course for foreigners in Istanbul. Everyone is from Europe, except for one Japanese woman, and she is the only one who doesn't have a big problem with Turkish grammar.
As soneone who knows German i can appreciate what an online Turkish YouTuber said, that German and Turkish are good "partner" languages, meaning that, although quite unrelated, the sharing of umlauts and fairly straight-forward pronunciation rules gives them similarities to each other that can be quite helpful :-)
If kaptanIn is already showing possesion, why cocugu must also have a possessive character?
Because that's how Turkish works: possession is shown on both the possessor and the thing possessed.
İ don't understand where the -ın suffix comes from. İt's the suffix for possessive 2nd person singular, but why is it used here?
-in is also the suffix for "of the"
Kaptan + ın = of the captain
"of your captain" would be "kaptanının"
First "your" then "of the".
Kaptanın = your captain
[Kaptanın]-ın = of [your captain]
If it were "of my captain":
First "my", then "of the": Kaptanım -> Kaptanımın.
-ın/-in/-un/-ün is the possessive suffix for "everybody/everything". This sentence could literally be translated as "There is a child of the captain" or like Luke51991 said "As for the captain, a child exists".
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In this case, 'Kaptanın bir çocuğu var' should be more likely to be translated into ' There is a child of captain's' The reason why is that 'the Subject is a child, not a captain' In other words, the captain's one child exists or A child of captain's exists.
If this sentence, however can be translated into ' The captain has a child', then 'the captain is 'the Subject'
English has two types of grammarical possessive expressıons like ' Subject has/ have Object. And There is/are Subject' At this point, I wonder if Turkish has two types of possessive expressıons.
Finally, if I introduce myself just a little bit to you, I am Korean learing Turkish myself for three months now, finding that Turkish has the absolutely similar linguistic structure to Korean. Kaptanın선장의 bir한 çocuğu아이가 var있다. meaning that "there is a child of captain's". The captain has a child in English --> 선장은 한 아이를 가지고 있다. Both have the same meanings intrinsically but the different structures.
why not acepted " The Capitan's Child"
"Capitan" is not an English word.
Also, the Turkish sentence Kaptanın bir çocuğu var. means The captain has a child.
The captain's child would be kaptanın çocuğu -- the word var makes the difference: you might translate the full sentence literally as "The captain's child exists" but in English we express this as "The captain has a child".