"Kaptanın bir çocuğu var."

Translation: The captain has a child.

[Luke_5.1991]

This is almost like Japanese. In Japanese, you write "As for the captain, a child exists." To mean the captain has a child.

[Physiker729]

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! :)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altaic_languages

[JoannaKilanska]

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.

[drumwhacker]

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 :-)

[Sergiolin]

If kaptanIn is already showing possesion, why cocugu must also have a possessive character?

[mizinamo]

Because that's how Turkish works: possession is shown on both the possessor and the thing possessed.

[Dkenneth]

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?

[Ektoraskan]

-in is also the suffix for "of the"

Kaptan + ın = of the captain

"of your captain" would be "kaptanının"

[Hojinkie]

Which suffix would come first?

[Ektoraskan]

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.

[A1fie]

-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".