29 Comments
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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.
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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! :)
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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.
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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 :-)
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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.
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-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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If kaptanIn is already showing possesion, why cocugu must also have a possessive character?
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Because that's how Turkish works: possession is shown on both the possessor and the thing possessed.
but it is not utilized here. only for the captain but not in child. I'm confused why it is not.
but it is used. "Kaptan[ın] bir çocuğ[u]" - where çocuk only becomes çocuğu because of the possessive ending (and because of consonant softening when a vowel is attached)... Think of it as "(of) The captain's his children there is one." but keep in mind that - when numerals are used - Turkish uses no plural. If you wanted to say the captain has two children, it would become "(of) The captain's his children there are two." -> "Kaptanın iki çocuğu var."
And I am aware that my attempt at a literal translation is horrible and wrong English ;)
Is there a different way of explicitly stating that the captain has one child, not more? Or is the turkish ambiguous with "a child" / "one child" here?
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You can say "bir tane çocuğu var" which makes it clear that he has only one child.
Just checked the translator, so "bir tane" is like "one piece", only that "tane" means more like "amount of s.t." in turkish?
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Yes, "tane" or "adet" is used for countable items to emphasize the number of them.
Benim 3 tane kalemim var. == I have 3 (pieces of) pencils.
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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.
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I wrote "captain has a child" the app Says it should've been "A captain" this doesn't make a sense to me "A captain" should be "bir kaptan"
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in english it is either "a captain" (not a specified one) or "the captain" (a specific one). You cannot just say captain. And in Turkish both can be "kaptan"; if you talk about "a captain" you may say "bir kaptan" but you don't have to.
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Genitive and next accusative. I can understand the accusative with var but genitive? Literally Captain's a child "var". Which is the subject here? It seems var is impersonal, right?
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There is no accusative in this sentence.
The verb is var (which you might understand as "exists" or "there is") and the subject is kaptanın bir çocuğu -- a child of the captain's.
The -u ending on çocuğu is possessive -- literally, "of-the-captain one child-his exists" = "the captain has a child".
You would be able to see the difference more clearly with a noun that ends in a vowel, e.g. kaptanın bir radyosu var "The captain has a radio" -- the accusative would be radyoYU, and radyoSU is clearly possessive.
Because it is the child "of the captain" - "-u" in this case is the possessive ending for third person singular. See the post of @mizinamo above, which addresses the same question
