The problem about past tense, and not only in Turkish, is that in addition to

          denoting action that took place before this point in time

it also has the function of

          making a distance between reality and other possible worlds.

It is kind of playing in two different levels of abstraction. Separating these two is sometimes a problem especially when you try to learn a new language. That´s why there is such a desperate need for simple rules like

Thank you, scalpel. You saved me from learning how to attach images to my posts.

Expressing opinions:

1. In my view, birds should not be kept in cages. Bana göre, kuşlar kafeste tutulmamalı.

2. How important is it, in your view, that the twins should stay together? ~ In my opinion, it´s very important. Size göre, ikiz kardeşlerinin beraber kalması ne kadar önemli? ~ Fikrimce, çok önemli.

3. From my point of view it makes no difference whether you return on Saturday night or Sunday morning. İster Cumartesi gecesi ister Pazar sabahı dön, benim için farketmez.

4. From a political point of view, the agreement of the UN is extremely important. Siyası açıdan bakınca Birleşmiş Milletler’in anlaşması aşırı derecede önemlidir.

5. From the point of view of safety, always wear a helmet when you are on the building site. Emniyet bakımdan bina yerinde bulunurken her zaman bir miğfer giyin.

6. To my mind the quality of their football is just not good enough. Kanımca, fulbolların niteliği sadece yeter değil.

7. I reckon it´ll rain later today. Let´s go tomorrow. Sonra bugün yağmur yağacağını zannedıyorum. Yarın gidelim.

8. I feel she shouldn´t be getting married so young. Bana öyle geliyor ki o kadar gençken evlenmemeli.

9. If you ask me, it´s unreasonable to pay for something which should be free. Bana sorarsan, bedava olması gereken bir şey için para ödenmesi mantıksız.

10. To be honest, I´m surprised you got into university with such low grades. Dürüst olarak, o kadar kötü notlarla üniversite’ye girmen beni şaşırttı.

11. As far as I´m concerned, the matter is over and done with and we can now move forward. Bana gelince, konu olup bitti ve biz şimdi ileri hareket edebiliriz.

12. How acceptable is it for wild animals to be kept in zoos? Yabani hayvanların hayvan bahçelerinde tutulması ne kadar kabul edilir?

13. It seems to me that the best relationships - the ones that last - are frequently the ones that are rooted in friendship. Bana öyle görünüyor ki en iyi, dayanan ilişkiler sık sık kökleri arkadaşlıkta bulunanlar.

14. I would argue that it is simply impossible to objectively tell if a person is intelligent. Bir şahısın akıllı olup olmayacağı nesnel olarak söylenmesinin sade bir şekilde olanaksız olduğunu iddia ediyorum.

15. It´s sometimes argued that there is no real progress. Bazen gerçek ilerlemenin olmadığı tartışılır.

16. By this I mean hospitals and schools should be our first priority. Bununla hastane ile okullar birinci önceliğimiz olmalarının gerektiğini demek istiyorum.

Yes, Muhammad Ali Pasha made a distance to the Ottomans but maybe shared the same esthetic eye with them. They say he was Albanian but spoke good Turkish.

I wanted to add the pictures of Muhammad Ali mosque and Yeni Cami but I am so untalented. Maybe I will try to modify it later. (Or maybe someone will feel pity for me and add them to the tread...)

Today I visited one of the greatest mosques of Cairo. Masjid Muhammad Ali Basha (Alabaster mosque) is situated in the Saladin Citadel of Cairo and it is a landmark which can be seen from a distance no matter from which direction you approach the city. The mosque was built in the first half of the 19^th century.

Muhammad Ali, who is considered the founder of modern Egypt, decided to follow the style of the Ottomans. The architect was Yusuf Bushnak from Istanbul and the model for Muhammad Ali mosque was Yeni Cami.

Thus, Muhammad Ali Mosque is a piece of Ottoman Architecture in Cairo even though the building was completed fifty years after the undeniable rulership of the Ottomans had come to its end.

The difference between hypothetical and counterfactual condition, is it this simple? The speaker has a presumption  -  correct or false  -  in his mind: the condition could realize or it couldn’t. The grammatical choices he makes in the sentence reflect his thoughts about the state of the world.

The most difficult difference for me personally has been the one between Erdinc’s types II ja III. I am beginning to realize now that maybe part of the problem is lack of non-linguistic context. If you try to translate a theoretical sentence into Turkish you are likely to miss the assumption there is between the speaker’s ears  -  or understand it in your own way.

Let’s talk about sleeping early which was the issue in a couple of the examples. Let’s suppose there is a schoolboy who day after day falls asleep in class. The teacher talks to the mother and suggests politely:

Erken yatarsa, yorgun olmayacak.

She is introducing a hypothetical situation, a possible solution for the problem, a chance. She knows the boy doesn’t sleep early but she doesn’t want to blame the mother.

Suppose this mother went home. She is embarrassed because of what she was told, especially because she knows the teacher is right: the boy regularly watches tv until late night. She meets the boy and tells him:

Erken yatsaydin, yorgun olmayacaktın.

She feels annoyed because she knows the boy is not going to listen to her (or she wants him to think she thinks this way). The condition is not going to become true, it is counterfactual.

Am I close?

I’ll rise this up. There is still some checking to do.

There is one here that interests me.

We have been living in Kusadasi for 2 months, however we don´t know where the post office is.

Kuşadası´da iki aydır yaşanıyoruz, ne var ki nerede oluğu postaneyi bilmiyoruz.

1. Kuşadası is a compound noun, it consists of kuş ‘bird’ and ada ‘island’. –si in the end is a possessive suffix. That’s why I think there should be –n- before the case ending. (See what Henry explained above.) > Kuşadasında

2. The verb is yaşamak. With vowel narrowing and present continuous tense it is going to be yaşıyoruz.

3. What is it that we don’t know? Where the post office is. The whole question needs to be inlayed into the other sentence. In addition we need to add olmak to postane nerede because there are some grammatical elements we need to hang to it. When inlaying a sentence, pay attention to the changes in two words, subject and predicate. In this case,

- subject is postane. It is going to take the genitive ending. > postanenin

- predicate is olmak. We need the participle form olduk. Add 3^rd person possessive suffix, pronominal –n- and the accusative ending (bilmek governs accusative words) and you get olduğunu.

The result in my opinion should be something like

Kuşadasında iki aydır yaşıyoruz, ne var ki postanenin nerede olduğunu bilmiyoruz.

If it is wrong someone will come and correct it.

Are you sure those people are good company for you, deli dear?

I guess I found it:

www.tureng.com

If you make a search for gelmek, for instance, skip the most usual results and roll the page down, you will find a list meanings of “gelmek” with other terms: 100 result(s). I guess this way one can find just anything. I think the best search words are the commonest verbs.

Looking for idioms tureng gives so detailed answers that I feel like I am cheating when I use it.

The classification of conditional clauses presented in Erdinc’s earlier post (which initially was recommended to me by Henry, who else) has helped me but what has confused me is that in real language the five types presented there are not so pure. It seems to me now after I saw scalpel’s text that there is more freedom in Turkish than in English what comes to the syntactic appearance of the combination of if clauses and conditional clauses. Hypothetical conditions (-r + ise) not only modify sentences with future but also with aorist or potential predicates in the above examples. Good to know.

I don’t know if my impression of English conditionals is limited. Anyway, my late English teacher taught me very strict and formal rules about the tenses of the if clauses modifying sentences with will or would and I never questioned them. There was no elbowroom at all. It seems that there is in Turkish.

Another interesting detail is combining the use of –dik + poss + de gerund (it is a gerund, isn’t it?) with zero condition clauses. Actually this point of use lightens both of their uses.

So far so good. Ok, Henry, let’s go to the unreal conditions. What seems a hypothetical condition to me often turns out to be unreal in Turkish. Let’s see how you explain that.