My Try:

Could it be this simple?

SUBJ  -  dropped pl 3 pronoun

PRED  -  etti|ler

OBJ  -  en iyi dua|ları|n|ı

> ´they made their best invocations´

In my opinion, this is the hard part:

                        onun ettiği yardımlar için

There must be a message in the plural form of yardımlar. My guess is instead of talking about ´help´ in general it means some concrete deeds, let´s say ´charities´.

I see two ways of interpreting için: 1) because (´because of the charities he had paid´ ) 2) so that, in order to (´so that he would pay charities´ ). On the basis of the participle ettiği being used I believe the speaker talks about actions that actually have been committed (the second alternative would be expressed with an infinitive onun yardımlar etmesi için or something similar).

>> ´They made their best invocations because of the charities he had paid.´

No?

Yes, the other phrases you mentioned should be correct, Johnk.

Emin misin?

Yes, there is a small group of more or less advanced learners in my home town. And a very good native teacher.

You can´t imagine how many times Turks have asked me this. I am surprised how well Turkish people know the specialities of their own language. Finns generally do not bother their heads with such things.

I am not a specialist but because you ask I answer: no.

The most important reason for me to think this way is  -  as you suggested, gokuyum  -  lack of common basic vocabulary. I think the syntactic similarities between Finnish and Turkish are language universals which to some extent show in all agglutinative languages. They are amazing enough though. No wonder the tools used in language planning are also very much the same (that is why kuyruklu yıldiz = pyrstö|tähti).

And anyway, if there are common roots they are so deep in the ground they have no practical meaning. I am not learning Turkish easily (if that is what you think).

I am not capable of analysing my own language learning but I get an idea when I listen to my Turkish teacher Hatice hanım who speaks excellent Finnish. I analyse her speech constantly: I know why she has difficulty pronouncing our diphtongs, I know why she uses certain pronouns in a peculiar way... But one thing especially has attracted my attention: she is not afraid of long words which other learners of Finnish always complain about, she jumps into the system of word inflection just like she has always been there. That is because she has.

My Try:

You are attached to the one you believe you are in love with: "I cannot live without her, I love her deeply". Don´t you ever think who is it that made you love her? As for me, I must have loved the one who made me love you.

I wish you all a happy feast also.

Even though Ottomans built pompous buildings in Istanbul it seems that they were not so much to bridges. The first reported bridge over the Golden Horn was built by Justinian the Great in the 6th century but it took a long time before Hayratiye köprüsü  - the foregoer of Atatürk köprüsü connected Azapkapı and Unkapanı in 1845. And only as late as in 1973 that it was possible to cross Bosphorus with dry feet.

Interestingly, Ottomans built numerous bridges to the West of Istanbul as early as during Kanuni and Yavuz. Some bridges are mentioned even in the CV of Mimar Sinan.

I have been to Istanbul a long time ago and I always tell people the only thing I remember from there is Galata bridge. Wrong also. The present bridge was built after my visit in 1994.

http://www.kenthaber.com/marmara/istanbul/Rehber/kopruler

Başüstüne is like hemen yaparım I guess.

Ekşi sözlük says there is something funny about using it here and I cannot understand the joke:

- babana selam söyle!
+ başüstüne!

Funny, it is comet in every other language but Turks and Finns call it ´star with a tail´. It is probably an invented word in both languages. I am delighted: Moomin books are a good choice to translate to any language from (not-Finnish-but) Swedish.

Notes:

1. Choosing between singular and plural did not get any easier. Like

                              Moominler, büyük yuvarlak burunlarıyla...

even though they have only one each. The use of plural is even more difficult to understand when we talk about mental qualities like

                              Samimiyetlerinin onları sık sık maceralara sevketmesine rağmen...

Can I generalize this rule about body parts?

                              onların burunları/*burnu

2. An example of -iş- participle, you don´t see them so much: 

                              Noelin gelişine  hazırlanmalarını

3. Definite objects sometimes appear where you expect indefinite:

                               mutluluğu hissedebilir

                               birkaç huzurlu ve sessiz anı dört gözle beklemektedir.