Lessons · 19 of 24

Sentences with no verb

Six endings that turn a noun into a whole sentence — and not a verb in sight.

Here is a proverb, and it is also your first two Karachay sentences:

bügün duniya kibik, tambla ahıratdı — today is (this) world, tomorrow the hereafter

Read it again and look for the verb. There isn't one — not in the first half, not in the second, and nothing has been left out. Karachay does not need a word for is. It puts the is on the end of the word instead, and you can see it here: ahırat is "the hereafter", and ahıratdı is "it is the hereafter." That little dı is the whole of this lesson.

Sentences with no verb are not a curiosity in this language. They are how you say who you are, what a thing is, what it is like, and where it is — and they carry you through this entire unit before a single verb turns up.

The to-be endings

Six endings, one for each person, and they attach straight to a noun with nothing in between. oquwçu is a pupil or student:

• men oquwçuma — I am a student
• sen oquwçusa — you are a student
• ol oquwçudu — he / she is a student
• biz oquwçubuz — we are students
• siz oquwçusuz — you all are students
• ala oquwçudula — they are students

That is the shortest sentence the language builds. There is no word for "a" and no word for "am", so oquwçuma — one word — is a complete thought. Our sources have exactly that sentence standing alone, and they have men ustazma "I am a teacher" and ustazdı "she is a teacher" too. The pronoun in front is optional — the ending has already said who — and speakers add it for emphasis, the way English leans on the word I.

The vowel changes, the ending does not

Nothing new is being asked of you here. The endings wear whichever vowel the word in front of them wears — the rule from the reading lesson, and this is the cheapest place to practise it. Compare three words:

• ustazdı — he is a teacher (ustaz is back and unrounded, so dı)
• oquwçudu — he is a student (oquwçu is back and rounded, so du)
• üydü — it is a house (üy is front and rounded, so dü)

Same ending, three coats of paint. You do not have to work it out: say the wrong one out loud and it sounds wrong, which is the only test anyone actually uses.

You have been saying these since day one

Two of the first phrases anyone ever says to you are this lesson already, hiding in plain sight. qalay is "how", and qalaysa is the "how are you?" from the greetings — literally "how are you", with the you-are ending you just met. igi is "good", and the answer igime is "I am good" built the same way:

• qalaysa? — how are you?
• igime, saw bol — I'm fine, thank you

An exchange in our sources runs word for word: qalaysa? — igime. You could hold up your half of it before you knew a single ending, and now you can see what both halves are made of.

Why this set is worth the effort

These six are the present set, and they are the most reused endings in Karachay. The present tense, both futures and the perfect all end in this same set — so the endings you learned today on a noun are the endings you will meet again on every verb in the course, already known. That is the reason this unit comes first: it front-loads the one thing everything else is built out of, on words that need no stem changes, no linking vowel, and no softening.