Lessons · 22 of 24

Saying no

One little word, tul or tuyul, and the ending moves onto it.

Karachay has no "not" ending for a sentence with no verb in it. It has a word — and the interesting part is what happens to the ending you already know. Say ulludu "he is big" and you have the to-be ending sitting on ullu. Deny it, and that ending packs up and moves:

• ullu tülme — I am not big

The describing word goes back to its plain shape, bare, with nothing on the end of it. Everything that was there is now on the end of tül. That is the whole rule, and it holds for every person.

tül — the six forms

tül is the Karachay word for "is not", and it takes the same to-be endings you already know.

Those are the same six endings as everywhere else in this unit — ma, sa, dı, bız, sız, dıla, wearing the vowels that tül asks for. Nothing new to learn: you are putting an ending you already own onto one more word.

The one trap

The ending moves. It does not stay behind, and it never sits in two places at once. "I am at home" is üydeme; "I am not at home" is üyde tülme — never üydeme tül, and never üydeme tülme. Whatever you are denying stands there plain, and the word for "not" carries the person.

It denies anything

Anything you could say with the to-be endings, you can now deny — a describing word, a naming word, a place, a whole proverb. All of these are sentences from real texts:

• alay tüldü — that is not so
• igi tüldü — it is not good
• men endi sabiy tülme — I am not a child any more
• ala alay amanla da tüldüle — they are not so bad after all
• awruw ölüm tüldü — illness is not death

That last one is a proverb, and it is worth keeping. Things could be worse, it says: whatever this is, it is not the end. Set it beside mında igidi "it's good here" and you can see the two halves of the same machinery — one ending saying a thing is so, the same ending on one extra word saying it is not.

Two of these are settled beyond doubt: awruw ölüm tüldü and ullu tülme are both marked verified in the dictionary's own entry for the word. The rest are quoted from our parallel texts, where the word runs to several thousand lines.

Notice what you have just done without meeting a verb: you can name a thing, describe it, say where it is, and refuse every one of those. tül has one more job — refusing a plan, far ahead in the verb's own way of saying no — but nothing on this page needed it.