Turkish: A Comprehensive Grammar

-(y)A An Arabic suffix which indicates feminine gender: müdire ‘female director’. Also appears
on names given to women: Aliye, Fazıla.
-
(y)at
-
(y)In
Word classes, derivation and derivational suffixes 63
An Arabic suffix which forms nouns: tahkikat ‘investigation’, ihracat ‘exports’, maddiyat
‘material things’.
Unstressable suffix which attaches to terms denoting seasons, deriving adverbials: yazın ‘in
(the) summer’, kışın ‘in (the) winter’ (see also -leyin above).
-zede A suffix of Persian origin, which when added to nouns forms nouns indicating the victim of
some catastrophic event: depremzede ‘earthquake victim’, felaketzede ‘victim of a (certain)
disaster’.
7.3 THE INTERNAL ORDERING OF DERIVATIONAL SUFFIXES
There are no clear-cut rules governing all combinations of derivational suffixes.
However, there are a few points which apply to the majority of cases:
(i) Unproductive derivational suffixes tend not to co-occur.
(ii) Suffixes which are unproductive tend to precede productive ones (although it may
be very difficult in many cases to decide which category a suffix belongs to). For
example, the productive noun-forming suffix -lIk follows the unproductive -(y)An:
bak- ‘look’+-(y)An→bakan ‘minister’+-lIk→bakanlık ‘ministry’
But the same suffix -lIk can occur before or after an equally productive one, e.g. the
noun-deriving suffix -CI:
göz ‘eye’+-lIK→gözlük ‘spectacles’+-CI→gözlükçü ‘optician’
göz ‘eye’+-CI→gözcü ‘guard’+-lIK →gözcülük ‘being a guard’
It can also recur in the same word:
göz-lük-çü-lük ‘the profession/business of an optician’
7.4 PREFIXATION
Apart from the reduplicative prefixes discussed in Chapter 9, the only prefixes Turkish
has are of foreign origin:
antidemokratik ‘antidemocratic’
postmodern ‘postmodern’
gayrimüslim ‘non-Muslim’
bihaber ‘unaware’, ‘ignorant’
namütenahi ‘infinite’