Turkish: A Comprehensive Grammar

mısír ‘maize’ Mísır ‘Egypt’
ordú ‘army’ Órdu (a city on the Black Sea coast of Turkey)
bebék ‘baby’ Bébek (a district in Istanbul)
(iv) The following question words and those that contain the suffix -rA (see 4.3.2 (iii))
are stressed on the first syllable:
hángi ‘which’
háni ‘where’ (informal)
násıl ‘how’
níçin ‘why’
(v) Stems which have reduplicative prefixes (Chapter 9) and most of the stems containing
loan prefixes (7.4) are stressed on the prefix:
kápkara ‘pitch black’
ásosyal ‘antisocial’
Turkish: A comprehensive grammar 28
(vi) Stems that contain unstressable suffixes, see 4.3.1.
(vii) Stems which are compounds (4.2).
4.2 STRESS IN COMPOUNDS
Most noun compounds are stressed on (the stressable syllable of) the first element:
búgün (bu ‘this’+gün ‘day’) ‘today’
báşbakan (baş ‘head’+bakan ‘minister’) ‘prime minister’
This is also true of -(s)I compounds (10.2), irrespective of whether the two roots are
written together or separately:
sokák lambası ‘street light’
telefόn rehberi ‘telephone directory’
çáy bardağı ‘tea glass’
dérs kitapları ‘textbooks’
búzdolabı ‘refrigerator’ (lit. ‘ice cupboard’)
kasímpatı ‘chrysanthemum’ (lit. ‘November aster’)
deréotu ‘dill’ (lit. ‘stream weed’)
However, there are exceptions, and some compounds are stressed on the final syllable,
like regular stems: