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Turkish grammar wheels
Grammar Wheels
"I gave my three books to her at the market." — Change any wheels to see how Turkish encodes each shift.
Common questions about Turkish
What can I toggle on the Turkish wheel?
Subject (ben, sen, o, biz), tense (past, present, future), aspect (simple, -yor progressive, -mış perfect), mood (declarative, question, command), polarity, voice (active, -ıl passive), evidentiality (-dı witnessed vs -mış reported), and definiteness. Each spin rebuilds the verb with vowel-harmonized suffixes.
What does the witnessed / reported evidentiality dial do?
-dı marks events the speaker witnessed; -mış marks events known by report, inference, or hearsay. Toggling evidentiality switches the suffix on the same verb stem and shifts the speaker's commitment to the claim.
How does vowel harmony show up on the wheel?
Suffix vowels match the last vowel of the stem (front vs back, rounded vs unrounded). The same plural marker appears as -lar after a back vowel and -ler after a front one, and the wheel runs that match automatically when you swap a suffix in.
Why doesn't switching subject gender change anything?
Turkish has no grammatical gender. Pronouns and verb endings stay the same regardless of whether the subject is masculine or feminine, so the wheel just notes the choice without rewriting the form.
Can I follow the wheel without studying Turkish first?
Each generated sentence shows Turkish, a word-by-word gloss separating root and suffixes, and an English translation. Because Turkish stacks meaning into suffixes, the gloss makes the moving parts visible at a glance.
Sources for Turkish
The grammatical descriptions on this page are informed by the following published reference and descriptive grammars. Grammatical facts themselves are not subject to copyright; the scholars who documented them deserve attribution.
- Göksel, Aslı & Kerslake, Celia (2005). "Turkish: A Comprehensive Grammar." Routledge. — Person markers (Group 1 and Group 2): pp. 82–83 (§8.4). — Case suffixes (5-way -(y)I, -(y)A, -DA, -DAn, -(n)In/Im): pp. 67–68 (§8.1.3). — Possessive suffixes (4-way harmonic): pp. 66–67 (§8.1.2). — Perfective -DI has 8 surface forms (-dı/-di/-du/-dü/-tı/-ti/-tu/-tü): p. 44 (§6.1). — Imperfective -(I)yor and its interaction with negation (-mA + -(I)yor → -mIyor): pp. 77–78 (§8.2.3.3). — ben/sen → bana/sana before dative -(y)A (irregular pronoun stem): p. 46 (§6.1.3).
- Kornfilt, Jaklin (1997). "Turkish." London: Routledge (Descriptive Grammars series).
- Lewis, G. L. (2000). "Turkish Grammar." 2nd ed. Oxford: Clarendon Press.