Lesson 8 — The whole family

1The family: who’s who

Abla, abi, teyze, amca — you’ve known these since Lesson 2, as what people call strangers at the market. Today they go home, back to what they first meant. And on the way it turns out Turkish counts a family more carefully than English does: one word for “uncle” won’t cover it.

Start with the core. Say each word out loud, have a go at remembering or guessing — and only then open the translation.

Kardeş means “brother or sister” — Turkish doesn’t mind which, just like onun last lesson. When it matters, put kız or erkek in front. Why there are no endings anywhere in that — section 5. And the older ones usually don’t get called by name at all: that’s what abla and abi are for.

Eş is one word for husband and wife alike. Eşim is “my husband” or “my wife”, depending on who’s talking. Polite, and right anywhere from a form to a wedding table.

Grandad is the same on both sides — dede. Grandmothers, though, come in two kinds, with two different words. Your mum’s mum is anneanne, literally “mum-mum”. Your dad’s is babaanne, “dad-mum”. Watertight logic, and glued together without a single ending.

Now the big surprise. You can’t say “uncle” in Turkish until you’ve decided whose brother he is. Dad’s brother is amca; mum’s is dayı. Aunts work the same way: dad’s sister is hala, mum’s is teyze. You remember teyze and amca from the market — this is who they are at home.

Even the people who married in have words of their own. Your brother’s or uncle’s wife is your yenge. Your sister’s or aunt’s husband is your enişte. At a Turkish family table, nobody goes without a name.

2“I’ve got”: var with an ending

Not long after “where are you from?”, someone will ask you this: Kardeşin var mı? It’s built from things you already have — Lesson 7’s “your” ending and Lesson 2’s var. Word for word: “your sibling — is there one?”. Turkish needs no separate verb for “have”.

And remember Lesson 3’s rule: no plural after a number. So it’s iki çocuğumuz, not çocuklarımız — and üç kardeşim.

To give their names, use last lesson’s genitive — you’ll need it again in the very next section:

3Izafet: when two nouns make a pair

Ablamın adı, Ayşe’nin arabası — last lesson you were building pairs like these, and we deliberately didn’t give them a name. They have one: izafet. It sounds like something from a sweet shop, and all it means is “two nouns in a pair, one pinning down the other”. Good news straight away: you already know the first kind. The second is the first minus one ending. The third has no endings at all.

The first kind — the full one, both endings — answers “whose?” and talks about something specific. For families, it’s the workhorse:

And then izafet does its party trick. Something that already belongs to someone can become an owner itself: put the genitive on it and the pair turns into a chain. Kardeşi ends in a vowel, so it takes -nin, with that bracketed n from last lesson: kardeşinin.

Bit of a mouthful? That’s exactly why Turkish has teyze: teyzemin oğlu says the same thing, shorter. There’s a word kuzen, “cousin”, too — but the description tells you which side, and in a Turkish family the side matters.

If you lose track of who’s whose by the third link, that’s normal. Read it from the end: the last word is who it is, and everything before it says whose.

4Doğum günü: a pair with no owner

Last lesson left a debt: why doğum günü, and not just doğum gün? Here’s the payback. Take the -nin off the first kind of izafet and you get the second. Doğum günü isn’t a day belonging to some particular birth. It’s a kind of day — a birth-day. The first word isn’t an owner any more; it’s a label.

The easiest way to tell them apart: the first kind answers “whose?”, the second “what kind?”. Compare:

And now the nice part: you’ve been saying pairs like this since the early lessons — nobody took them apart, that’s all. Lesson 3’s çay bahçesi is a tea kind of garden, not a garden owned by some tea. Şeker Bayramı is a sweets kind of holiday. Even Lesson 1’s glass is a çay bardağı.

Place names work the same way: Kadıköy iskelesi is the pier at Kadıköy, where the ferry brought Deniz and Can in Lesson 5.

Two rules, and you nearly know both. First: the pair doesn’t come apart. Anything describing it goes in front of the whole thing. Nothing gets in between — not even bir.

Second: the -sı on the second word behaves exactly like last lesson’s “his” ending — because that’s what it is. Before a case, an n slips in: çay bahçesinde. And when you want “my” or “your”, the new ending doesn’t go on top — it takes the old one’s place: doğum günü → doğum günüm. That’s where Doğum günün kutlu olsun comes from, and Lesson 3’s Telefon numaran kaç? — both now taken apart to the last letter.

5Kız kardeş: a pair with no endings at all

The third kind is the laziest. Two nouns stand side by side, and that’s it. It happens in two cases: when the first word says what a thing is made of, and when it says whether someone is male or female.

Compare the first kind: Ayşe’nin yüzüğü is Ayşe’s ring — somebody’s. Altın yüzük is a ring made of gold, whoever it belongs to.

And here’s the answer to the riddle from section 1: kız kardeş and erkek kardeş are this kind of pair. A “girl-sibling” is a sister. Kız arkadaş and erkek arkadaş are built the same way — and careful here: they often mean girlfriend and boyfriend rather than a friend who happens to be a girl or a boy. For plain “my friend”, arkadaşım is plenty.

And anneanne and babaanne are two words pressed together too — they just got written as one long ago. So, to keep it straight: “whose?” — two endings; “what kind?” — one; “made of what” or “male or female” — none.

7Dialogue: who are all these people?

Sunday morning. Ayşe and Can run into a whole procession on the stairs: Sevim teyze’s family has come to visit. Work out who’s who along with them — and the story will tell you what went on behind the door.

8Reading

In Lesson 7, Sevim teyze’s plate just couldn’t stop: a plate never goes back empty, so it kept going up and down the stairs — up with börek, down with baklava. Today it’s upstairs again, and it lands right in the middle of a family breakfast.

9The lesson’s new words

Everything new from today, in the order it turned up. Abla, abi, teyze and amca aren’t here: you learned them in Lesson 2 — today they simply got a home address.

10Say it yourself

No options here — you build the answer. Read the cue, say it in Turkish out loud, and only then check. Got it wrong? Great — the miss is what sticks. Peeking first doesn’t help: that trains recognising, not speaking.

11Check yourself

Six items: who’s who in the family, and how many endings a pair needs. A miss still shows you the right answer, so there’s no shame in guessing.

12Homework

Family words are best learned on your own family — no textbook can compete with that. Everything below is out loud. If hala and teyze keep swapping places at first, don’t worry: Turkish kids don’t get it straight first time either.