Quote:scalpel

Can I reply, please?

Please do, scalpel. I´m sorry I put my nose to something I don´t really master. I took the risk because deli knows how I can mess it sometimes and doesn´t take me too seriously.

A command? I can´t imagine.

Could it be ´there is no lack, shortage, deficiency´?

I think gitsen denotes a counterfactual situation, existing only in someone´s mind, while gidersen is used for hypothetical but possible conditions. As the listener is just one click away from the page and it is probable he will go there, we use gidersen. But this is my most fragile point in all grammar rules that I have learned, wait for others, wait for Faruk who translated it.

yok is the Turkish way to express non-existing. It is the counterpart of the affirmative var. You will find it in possessive constructions  and in sentences which in English begin with there is/there are.

Çorbanın tuzu yok. ‘There is no salt in the soup.’

Evde bir tane bile fazla ampul yok. ‘There is not even one spare light bulb in the house.’

yok and değil can be used in double negative construction. Double negative makes affirmative:

Yok değil bu kalpte kimse. ‘Yes, there is someone in this heart.’

In the end some hindsight for those who have sometimes wondered whether to use yok or değil in sentences with a locative modifier: both will do.

Semra partide değildi/yoktu. ‘Semra was not in the party.’

I can imagine a difference in meaning but it is better that I don’t say it.

This is tunci’s sentence from an old thread. For some reason I liked it and saved it for future use:

Simit, hem zenginin hem de fakirin severek yediği tek yiyecektir.

(simit ‘bagel’, hem…hem de ‘both…and’, zengin ‘rich’, fakir ‘poor’, sevmek ‘to like’, tek ‘the only’, yemek ‘to eat’ ) 

First it is important to understand that this is a nominal sentence. For reasons which are told below the last word looks like a verb but it is a noun combined with the copula ‘to be’. So, what is basically said is

> A bagel is something.

yi|y|ecek = verb stem + BUFFER + future participle marking ‘something to eat, food’. Some future participles have frozen into nouns, yiyecek is one of them, but luckily we can still recognize it from its parts.

> A bagel is [something to eat].

As we now have the subject and the predicate, what we find in between is probably modifiers or the nominal predicate, i.e. it tells us something about yiyecek.

There are two modifiers, an adjective and a subclause:

1. Let’s take the easy one, tek, first:

> A bagel is the only [something to eat].

2. The sentence is hem zengin ve hem fakir yer/yiyor ‘both rich and poor eat’. When a whole sentence is changed into an attribute, changes happen. They usually happen in the subject (> genitive zengin|in, fakir|in) and in the predicate (> participle ye|diğ|i = verb stem + participle marking + possessive suffix sg 3rd).

There is a small gerund sev|erek in the middle: -erek usually denotes the way something is done, ‘in a loving way, with pleasure’.

> A bagel is [both rich and poor with pleasure eat] only [something to eat].

A native English speaker should take the last step but I will give it a try:

‘A bagel is the only thing both rich and poor people eat with pleasure.’

I warn you, sufler, this is a bad bad one. You can start with the old threads: type "conditional" or "if" or something to the search box above and you will get plenty of text to read. This is one of the recent discussions, a pretty good one:

http://www.turkishclass.com/forumTitle_52547

Study it first and then ask again, will you?

İyi olmana sevindim. I was happy to hear you are fine.

If I wanted to say something like this I would probably try everything but this. What a delightful expression.

A pity. The world is not small.

You have your famous instinct, deli.