Lessons · 11 of 18

The six shapes of a noun

Where English reaches for little words like to, at, and from, the noun itself changes shape.

English points with little words: to the house, at the house, from the house. Karachay points by reshaping the noun itself. Every noun has six shapes — the cases — and once you know the endings for one noun, you know them for all of them.

Here is at ("horse") in all six:

• at — the horse · the plain form — the doer of the sentence
• atnı — the horse's · the owner
• atnı — the horse (as the object) · a specific, known object
• atha — to the horse · direction or recipient
• atda — at the horse · where something is
• atdan — from the horse · where something comes from — and "than"

Two of those forms are worth a second look. The owner form atnı appears in a real proverb — atnı semirtseng, cayaw cürümezse ("fatten your horse and you won't go on foot") — and the to-form is atha, not atğa: after a voiceless consonant the ending's deep g turns into h, the same shift you met in aythan back in lesson 8. Front-vowel nouns keep the soft g: kökge deri — "up to the sky."

You have been using two of these cases since the early lessons without the labels: mende bar ("I have it" — literally "at me it exists") is the at-form, and ol menden ulludu ("he is bigger than me") is the from-form doing double duty as "than". The pronouns bank lays out when each case is used; every noun page shows the full table for that word.