Turkish: A Comprehensive Grammar

Turkish: A comprehensive grammar 46
(i) The pronouns ben ‘I’ and sen ‘you’ become bana ‘to me’ and sana ‘to you’ when
the dative suffix -(y)A is added.
(ii) At the end of certain types of stem ‘n’ appears when particular suffixes are added:
(a) In the case of the 3rd person pronoun o (18.1.1) and the demonstrative
pronouns (18.2), ‘n’ appears when the following are attached:
the plural suffix -lAr (8.1.1)
case suffixes (8.1.3)
the adverbial suffix -CA (7.2.2.2)
the adjectival suffix -sIz ‘without’ (7.2.2.2)
Some examples are: ona ‘to him/her/it’, onlar ‘they’, onca ‘according to him/her’, onsuz
‘without him/her/it’, bunu ‘this (one) (ACC)’, şunlar ‘those’, bunsuz ‘without this’,
bunca ‘this much’.
The same applies in the case of the colloquial usage in which the
comitative/instrumental and conjunctive suffix -(y)lA ‘with’ (8.1.4) is affixed to the noncase-marked,
rather than to the genitive-marked, form of these pronouns: ↓onla ‘with
him/her’ (cf. onunla), ↓bunla ‘with this’ (cf. bununla).
(b) There are a number of other pronominal stems and two suffixes in which an
‘n’ appears when either case suffixes (8.1.3) or the adverbial suffix -CA (7.2.2.2)
are attached. These are the following:
– the personal pronoun kendi- (in its 3rd person reflexive, simple pronominal and
emphatic usages (18.1.3)): kendinde ‘at/on him/ her(self) (colloquial)’, kendince
‘according to him/her(self)’. Kendi behaves differently from the other two groups
listed below in that in informal speech -(y)lA can also attach to it by means of an
intermediary ‘n’: ↓kendinle ‘with him/her(self)’.
– the 3rd person possessive suffixes -(s)I (singular) and -lArI (plural) (8.1.2) and
pronouns containing them: kendisi ‘self’, ‘s/he’ (18.1.2), kendi kendisi ‘self’
(18.1.3), birbiri/birbirleri- ‘each other’ (18.1.4), and all of the pronominalized
determiners listed in 18.4 (iv): kendisine ‘to himself/herself’, birbirlerini ‘each
other (ACC)’, bazılarından ‘from some of them’, hepsinde ‘in all of them’, birine
‘to one of them’.
– the suffix -ki in its pronominal usage ‘the one…’ (18.5): evdekinde ‘in/on/at the one
in the house’, buradakinden ‘from the one which is here’.
(iii) In the case of just two stems, su ‘water’ and ne ‘what’, ‘y’ appears at the junction
with any of the following suffixes:
(a) the possessive suffixes, except the 3rd person plural
(b) the genitive suffix
e.g. suyum ‘my water’, suyun ‘your water’, ‘of the water’, neyimiz ‘what (of ours)’, neyi
‘what (of his/hers)’ (also nesi, but neleri ‘what (of theirs)’, sular ‘waters’). Note that the
forms ↓nem and ↓nen for ne+possessive can be used in informal contexts.