Hello, sweet Mavili. I noticed you have been absent. I hope you succeed in your studies.

Don´t take this thread as a lesson. It´s mostly a description of my own working on a certain subject. For sure you can find many better lessons on kendi and other pronouns. But to be honest, I myself never found the perfect description, and that´s why I am trying to collect my information from many sources. I have asked TC teachers to look through my text to avoid the worst handicaps but it´s still a learner´s text and should be taken as one.

In addition to its normal reflexive function like myself, yourself etc. in English it is also used for emphasis and this is one thing that confuses the learner sometimes. You see, it´s like the English reflexive and still there is something more to it.

There are two kinds of negation: sentence negation and constituent negation. At first sight it seemed to me that Turkish negative pronouns make the constituent negation while negating suffix –me- added to the predicate verb negates the whole sentence.

No. Nothing of the kind. Turkish negative pronouns always work together with the sentence negation and support it. There are other ways in the syntax to negate a single constituent.

The Persian origin hiç is the basis of Turkish negative pronouns. As an independent lexeme it is an indefinite pronoun with the meaning ‘nothing’ or ‘never’: Ne yaptın? Hiç. ‘What did you do? Nothing.’  Ankara’da hiç bulunmadım. ‘I never went to Ankara’.

In the Turkish translation of the famous tale “The Emperor’s New Clothes” the child in the middle of the crowd makes the crucial remark: Kral elbiselerini hiç giymemiş! ‘The King did’t put on any clothes at all!’ This represents the other important role of hiç as an emphatic particle which works as well on its own and fixed with indefinite pronouns bir- and kimse-: Hiçbirimiz kaderimizi seçmiyoruz. ‘None of us chooses his destiny’, Bildiğim tek şey hiçbir şey bilmediğimdir ‘The only thing I know is that I know nothing’, Hiç kimse kaderinden kaçamaz ‘No one escapes from his destiny.’

In world languages negative indefinite articles may or may not occur together with the predicate negation. In standard English, you can’t put nothing, never or no one with not in the same sentence. In Turkish, just like in Russian and as the matter of fact (according to linguists) in most languages there is no objection to this. Both hiç and its many combinations are in perfect harmony with predicate negation –me-. In most cases, hiç requires a negative form of the predicate which also shows that hiç is not necessarily needed to make the sentence negative and its many compounds basically have an emphatic meaning. The only exception is questions, where hiç can translate ‘ever’ while the predicate is affirmative: Hiç uçağa bindin mi? ‘Did you ever travel by plane?’ Maybe the negative pronoun in this case gives the listener a chance to say no without losing his face.

It seems that this rule doesn’t work to the opposite direction: a negative predicate can also have a positive pronoun as its subject, like in Böyle birşey hayatında görmedin ‘This shows that you didn’t see anything in your life’ and Devamlı çığlık attım ama kimse gelmedi ‘I screamed and screamed but no one came.’ It’s interesting to try to figure out how the meaning of these sentences would change if there was a hiç present in the form of hiçbir şey or hiç kimse. My bet is that with hiç the negation would be actually weaker (according to the same logics that makes Thank you!!!!!!!! less than Thank you) but this is actually a question for a native speaker to think of.

Hangi

- Like the English which, hangi offers the choice from a certain group which is a logical category in our mind (Hangi renk?) or a group defined in the textual or the non-textual context (Hangi kız daha güzel?).

- Hangi, even though it has a special character as a question word, is still an adjective and should be treated as one. It takes the syntactic role of an attribute. It doesn’t conjugate.

- When equipped with a possessive suffix hangi changes into a pronoun: hangimiz ‘which of us’. No need to say once the possessive suffix is present other endings can be added to hangi as well because it is no longer an adjective. The possessive suffix stresses the “one of the group” meaning which actually already exists in the basic meaning of the adjective hangi. We might ask what is the difference between hangi ülke and ülkelerin hangisi, because both of them denote choosing from a group. A simple Google search brings into light that usually before ülkelerin hangisi there is a modifier which narrows the group we are choosing from: not from among all countries but Avrupa ülkelerinden hangisi, bu/aşağıdaki ülkelerden hangisi.

Two questions about hangi for those who know better:

1. What is the neutral position of hangi in word queues where there are more adjective attributes than just hangi?

         büyuk bahçesi olan beyaz ev

If you want to ask ‘which white house with the big garden’ can you just drop hangi in the above sentence in some place or do you need to change it into a pronoun structure like

         büyük bahçesi olan beyaz evlerin hangisi?

2. Is it true as it seems to me that when hangi comes the indefinite article bir goes? I only find occurances of bir with herhangi. Can you say

         *Hangi bir erkek?

Ok, thanks, si++.

Tüm Oyunlar, Bütün Oyunlar, Oyunların hepsi is the headline of a Turkish children’s game site. A learner cannot see the small nuances but it seems to me that one and the same thing is said in three different ways. The language is oversupplied with expressions of ‘all’. It is one of the meanings of both tüm, bütün and hep-.

There used to be two words for ‘whole’ in Turkish, the homemade bütün and the Arabic origin tüm. The use of tüm was narrower while bütün when qualifying a plural noun also ment ‘all’. As a result of some kind of misunderstanding language reformers strongly recommended the same usage for tüm and succeeded. In local dialects tüm can still be restricted to the meaning ‘whole’. Both tüm Türkiye and bütün Türkiye have thousands of occurances in Google meaning ‘the whole Turkey’. I wonder if their colour is the same or if one of them sounds more archaic or rural than the other.

The syntactic roles of bütün and tüm differ slightly. While bütün is a noun and adjective (bütün millet or milletin bütünü ‘the whole nation&rsquo tüm is more like an adverb (tüm cahil ‘completely ignorant&rsquo.

In modern language both bütün and tüm are used with plural nouns with the pronominal meaning ‘all’: Alkol tüm kötülüklerin babasıdır. ‘Alcohol is the origin of all troubles’, Bütün yatırımcıların amacı, olabildiğince az risk alarak kar elde etmektir ‘Every investor’s aim is to make profit taking as small a risk as possible’. In possessive constructions bütün and tüm usually mean ‘whole’ but some cases of ‘all’ can be found. The occurances I found concern faceless groups of people like schoolers and soldiers: Hoca çocukların tümüne olumlu cevap vermiş:…, İrak’taki Amerikali askerlerinin tümü çekiliyor.

Tüm´s origin is disputed. Once I read an article about its origin. That article claimed that tüm is a Turkish loan in Arabic (tamam is derived from tümm).

We (Turks) and Mongols have some derivatives related to tüm.

It´s belived that there was a tü-* root in old Turkish. We have some derivatives:

tü-m

tü-k (seen in tü-k-e-t-mek and tü-k-e-n-mek both from tü-k-e-mek = increase, spread)

tü-gemel (in Mongol tüm, tamam, genel, yaygın)

Interesting. The Arabic input in Turkish vocabulary is so massive it wouldn´t be any wonder if it was exaggerated also in some details. One day while I was listening to an Arabic song it came to my mind that most of its words could be found in Turkish dictionary also, at least as the second alternative for certain meanings. It has made my learning easier, of course, but for some reason if I have the chance to choose between the original Turkish word and the Arabic loan I prefer the former even though they are both as foreign in my ears. It is just that loan words  -  even if they are a normal consequence of cultural contacts  -  are degeneration of language also if at a certain period of time they come in from doors and windows.

Thank you for taking a look at my text again, si++.

I just wanted to share my knowledge about kendi .. 

So kind of you, scalpel. With your additions my text finally gains some information value.

The wide use of Turkish dative has paid my attention in many occasions, with the pronoun kendi as well. (My opinion is you should have more grammatical cases in your language...)

Such as ...