Turkish: A Comprehensive Grammar

Turkish: A comprehensive grammar 98
As we saw in 10.1.1 (ii) above, when nouns of nationality (Türk, Alman, etc.) occur in
compounds denoting human beings, the second noun can be left unsuffixed, forming a
bare noun compound. However, in these cases a -(s)I compound is also possible:
İngiliz çocuklar-ı ‘English/British children’
Türk işçiler-i ‘Turkish workers’
Japon askerler-i ‘Japanese soldiers’
bir Rus sporcu-su ‘a Russian athlete’
Yunan başbakan-ı ‘the Greek prime minister’
There is a subtle difference between the meanings of the bare compound and the -(s)I
compound in such cases. While the bare compound identifies one or more individuals
who just happen to have a certain nationality, the -(s)I compound either (i) expresses a
whole class or group generically (such as British children, or the Turkish workers in a
particular factory, town, or country), or (ii) presents a person not primarily as an
individual human being but as someone functioning in some capacity on behalf of his/her
nation or country.
10.3 EMBEDDING COMPOUNDS WITHIN OTHER COMPOUNDS
Compounds can often be embedded within other compounds. For example, compounds
such as İngiliz edebiyatı ‘English literature’ or göz hastalıkları ‘diseases of the eye’ can
act as modifiers in other compounds:
İngiliz Edebiyat-ı Bölüm-ü ‘Department of English Literature’
göz hastalıklar-ı hastane-si ‘hospital for diseases of the eye’
Note that in these cases the marker -(s)I occurs on the head of each compound. Hence
longer forms can contain several markers, one for each head:
Türkiye Cumhuriyeti Milli Eğitim Bakanlığı Kadıköy Kız Yüksek Meslek Okulu
Müdürlüğü ‘The Directorate of the Kadıköy Technical College for Girls under the
Ministry of National Education of the Republic of Turkey’
The head of this multi-layered compound is müdürlük ‘directorate’, which is modified by
the following construction, itself a -(s)I compound:
Türkiye Cumhuriyet-i Milli Eğitim Bakanlığ-ı Kadıköy Kız Yüksek Meslek Okul-u
‘Kadıköy Technical College for Girls under the Ministry of National Education of the
Republic of Turkey’
The head of this compound is okul ‘school’, which has two simple modifiers, meslek,
here meaning ‘technical ‘and the adjective yüksek ‘high’ which when combined with okul
means ‘college’. Kız ‘girl’ modifies yüksek meslek okulu ‘technical college’, and Kadıköy