Lessons · 23 of 24

Asking

A syllable inside the word turns it into a question — unless a question word has done the job already.

Everything so far has been a statement. Turning one into a question costs almost nothing here — no change of word order, no helper like English "do". There are two ways to ask, and the second one is the one people get wrong, so it is worth meeting both today. Neither needs a verb.

One small syllable

For a yes-or-no question, add mı — or mi, mu, mü, its vowel matching the word in front of it, as every ending does. It goes inside the word: after the noun, before the to-be ending you learned first.

• üydü — it is a house
• üymüdü? — is it a house?
• atdı — it is a horse
• atmıdı? — is it a horse?
• sen oquwçumusa? — are you a student?
• sen ustazmısa? — are you a teacher?

Say them out loud and the harmony does itself: üy has a front rounded vowel so the syllable comes out mü, at is back and unrounded so it comes out mı. You are not choosing between four endings; you are choosing the one that already sounds right.

Our sources carry the particle sitting on plain words like this. One line has it twice over — olmu oğese başhamı?, "that one, or the other one?" — with nothing in the sentence but two words and the question on each of them.

All six, on one word

The endings after the particle are the same set as ever, so the whole table falls out of one word you already know:

• men oquwçumuma? — am I a student?
• sen oquwçumusa? — are you a student?
• ol oquwçumudu? — is he / she a student?
• biz oquwçumubuz? — are we students?
• siz oquwçumusuz? — are you all students?
• ala oquwçumudula? — are they students?

Answering

ho is yes — haw does the same job and you will hear both. oğay is no. In practice the answer repeats the sentence rather than standing alone, which means a yes-or-no question is also free practice in the two things you already have:

• atmıdı? — is it a horse?
• ho, atdı — yes, it is a horse
• oğay, at tüldü — no, it is not a horse

And the denial takes the shorter tüldü just as readily — oğay, at tüldü — which is the commoner shape in Karachay, exactly as you met it in the last lesson.

A question word asks by itself

Here is the rule that matters more than the particle. When a sentence already has a question word in it — kim "who", ne "what", qayda "where" — the particle disappears. The word itself is doing the asking, and the sentence is otherwise built exactly like a statement:

• bu nedi? — what is this? (ne is "what")
• ol kimdi? — who is that? (kim is "who")
• sen qaydasa? — where are you? (qayda is "where")
• qalaysa? — how are you? (qalay is "how")
• qaysı üyde? — in which house? (qaysı is "which")

The last of those is a fragment rather than a whole sentence — qaysı üyde? is "in which house?", and the ending on üy that puts something in it is the first thing the next unit teaches. Take the phrase whole for now; the question word is doing the same job in it either way.

qalaysa? is the greeting you have been saying since day one, and now you can see all of it: the question word qalay "how", and then the same to-be ending as oquwçusa. It was a lesson in this unit the whole time.

The trap is using both at once. nedi is "what is it?"; nemidi is not a sentence, because the question has already been asked once. One question per sentence, and a question word always wins. The rest of the set — where to, where from, when, why, how many — behaves the same way and lives in the question words bank.

That is the whole of asking, for now. There is not a verb anywhere in this lesson, and there does not need to be: you can ask what a thing is, who someone is, where they are, and whether any of it is so. Where the particle lands on a verb is a separate question with a longer answer, and it waits until there are verbs to put it on.