1199: Suffix Verbs (Turkish Copula) Mar 22, 2018

Some ideas can be conveyed without a verb, and examples of this often relate to copula verbs (i.e. verbs that connect other words, such as 'to be'). African American English and Latin both regularly omit them in general, and some languages like Russian and Hungarian omit them in specific contexts (in this case it is with the third person) but there are more than the two options to either have the verb present or omit it. In Turkish, which is a highly agglutinative language, the copula is included not as a verb in its own right but as a suffix, even though it is still meaningful. One of the ways that this is relevant is that Turkish has vowel-harmony meaning that the vowels of a affix change depending upon the vowels of the stem, and this happens for the copula in Turkish. Also, other verbs including Turkish's negative copula can take suffixes, but the positive copula cannot, even though it carries essentially the same meaning. It is possibly the only irregular verb in Turkish, and for non-Turkish speakers may be the first encounter with suffix-verbs.
Make sure to check out the new Word Facts Video: https://youtu.be/MuEqaI7W0hA
Support Word Facts on Patreon for new things and to help make the content better: https://www.patreon.com/wordfacts