Lessons · 15 of 18

Joining two actions

One ending turns a verb into a companion for the next one — and that is how Karachay says "bring", "until" and "as soon as".

English joins two actions with a small word — and, until, without. Karachay joins them by changing the shape of the first verb. The changed verb stops being the sentence's main event and becomes its companion: it carries no person, no tense, nothing. The verb after it carries everything.

The b form — "and then"

The workhorse. Add ıb to a consonant stem or a bare b to a vowel stem, and you have "having done it" — barıb, kelib, cazıb.

Its most useful job is one you meet on the first day. Karachay has no single word for bring or for take along. It says "take-and-come" and "take-and-go", and the pair behaves as one verb:

• alıb kelirge — to bring (take and come)
• alıb barırğa — to take along (take and go)
• çay alıb kel — bring some tea

A note on spelling, because you will see it both ways: this site writes b, not p. The p spelling is the Balkar literary standard, and every Karachay text we have leans hard the other way — barıb nine times against zero, etib twenty-nine against zero.

Until, and as soon as

Two more endings, each a whole English conjunction on its own. There is nothing further to add to them — they are finished words.

• barğınçı — until he goes
• kelginçi — until he comes
• kelgenley — as soon as he came
• aytmağanlay — without saying

The last one is worth a second look. It is the plain negative of the "as soon as" form, but it does not mean "as soon as he didn't say" — it means without saying. Both attested examples in our sources work that way, so treat the negative as its own word rather than as the opposite of the positive.

Turning the verb into a thing

Two endings do not join actions at all — they make the verb into a thing. One of them stops there; the other goes all the way and becomes a noun like any other.

ıw makes the act itself: barıw "the going", keliw "the coming".

It is a noun in shape only. You will meet these in speech, but they stay bare — they do not take the cases and owners of lessons 11 to 13, so there is no barıwnu and no keliwge. Where a sentence needs a proper noun there, the language reaches for a real one instead.

A few of them have hardened into ordinary dictionary words over time, and those behave like any other noun because that is what they now are: awruw "illness", uwçu "a hunter". Nobody hears a verb in them any more.

ıwçu makes the person: cazıwçu "a writer", barıwçu "one who goes". This is the single commonest word-building ending in the language — our sources hold several hundred of them — and the dictionary already carries one frozen solid as a plain noun: uwçu, "a hunter".

Do not mix it up with its near-twin from the next lesson. barıwçu is a person who goes; barıwçan is anyone who is in the habit of going. One letter apart, and two different parts of speech.

Before

Last, the one that looks like a case ending and is really a conjunction. Take barğançı, hang the ordinary owner and "to" endings on it, and the owner names who does the thing:

• barğançıma — before I go
• barğançınga — before you go
• barğançısına — before he goes

The same trick runs through the whole family: a possessive on a participle names the subject of the little clause, not its owner. barğanımda is "when I went", not "in my one that went".

"Our going" — the participle as a plain thing

Here is the payoff, and it is the piece most learners never find. Put an owner on a participle and then a case ending after it, and you have made the action itself into something a sentence can act on:

• barırıbıznı — our going
• eteribizni — our doing
• cürürübüznü — our walking

Read barırıbıznı from the left and it unpacks itself: go — the one that goes — ours — as the object. Every piece is one you already know from lessons 11 to 13; nothing here is new machinery, only the discovery that it stacks onto a verb as happily as onto a noun.

This is also why barıw does not need to do this job. The ıw form stays bare, as we said above — when a sentence needs the action as a proper noun, with an owner and a case, it reaches for the participle instead. Two forms, two jobs.