Turkish: A Comprehensive Grammar

‘Are you going anywhere this summer?’
The combination bir…lAr is occasionally encountered (again in informal usage) with
other nouns. It conveys that the referent is conceived as being plural, but that its identity
is unknown or unknowable.
(26) Bir sesler duydum galiba.
‘I think I heard something’ (lit. ‘some sounds’).
14.3.1.2 Further uses of the plural suffix -lAr
There are several other uses of -lAr which are observed particularly (although not
exclusively) in nouns whose primary denotation is an uncountable substance.
(i) A plurality of conventional measures or portions of the thing concerned:
(27) Çay-lar-ı koyayım mı?
tea-PL-ACC
‘Shall I pour out the tea?’
The noun phrase 149
This particular use of -lAr can occur even with nouns whose primary denotation is a
countable entity:
(28) Balıklar yendikten sonra tavuklar geldi.
‘After the fish had been eaten chicken arrived.’
(ii) A plurality of separate quantities of the thing concerned:
(29) Kir(ler) bir türlü çıkmıyordu.
‘The dirt just wouldn’t come out.’
(30) Bu işte büyük para(lar) var.
‘There’s big money involved in this business.’
(iii) In the case of substances with a granular composition, the addition of the plural
suffix shifts attention from the substance en masse to its constituent elements:
(31) Kum-lar-ı parmaklarının arasından geçiriyordu.
sand-PL-ACC
‘She was sifting the (grains of) sand through her fingers.’
(iv) The plural suffix can be used to designate a plurality of types of a substance:
(32) Bizim Migros’ta güzel şaraplar var.
‘There are nice wines at our Migros.’
(v) Certain expressions can be intensified by the addition of -lAr to the noun, for
example:
(33) Kan(lar)a bulanmıştı.
‘He was covered (all over) in blood.’