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The subject participle turns a verb into an adjective placed before a noun, naming that noun as the one who does the action — "the man who comes", "the child who runs".

What the subject participle does

Turkish builds relative clauses out of participles rather than a word like "who" or "which". The subject participle folds a whole verb-idea into a single adjective set in front of a noun: gelen adam is "the man who comes", koşan çocuk is "the child who runs", and masada duran kitap is "the book on the table". The noun that follows is understood as the one performing the verb.

It is a single suffix glued straight onto the verb stem. gelmek gives gelen, koşmak gives koşan, and durmak gives duran. The ending has two spellings, -en and -an, and which one you use is decided by the last vowel of the stem.

Vowel harmony picks the ending

The suffix vowel copies the front or back quality of the stem's last vowel. Front vowels — e, i, ö, ü — take -en, so gelmek becomes gelen. The back vowels take -an, so koşmak becomes koşan; the table shows which they are.

Only the front/back split counts here; whether the vowel is rounded plays no part, which is why the ending has two shapes rather than four. When the stem already ends in a vowel, a buffer -y- slides in so the two vowels never meet, giving -yen and -yan: uyumak becomes uyuyan and okumak becomes okuyan. That buffered ending is the third column of the table.

The negative participle

To make the participle negative, the negative marker -me or -ma goes on the stem first and the participle follows. Since -me and -ma end in a vowel, the same buffer -y- appears, so the whole ending surfaces as -meyen or -mayan: gelmek gives gelmeyen ("who does not come"), and olmak gives olmayan ("which is not").

Six worked forms

Read each form back to its verb and the shape is plain: the consonant-final stems take -en or -an directly, giden shows the t voicing, and the vowel-final stems take the buffered -yen or -yan.

Subject clauses versus object clauses

The subject participle -en and -an works only when the head noun is the subject. When the head noun is instead the object of the verb — the thing acted on rather than the actor — Turkish switches to a different participle, one that puts the subject in the genitive, as in çocuğun okuduğu kitap, "the book the child reads". The -en and -an form has no role there.

• kitap okuyan çocuk — "the child who is reading a book". The child is the subject, so okuyan is correct.
• çocuğun okuduğu kitap — "the book the child is reading". The book is the object, so the clause takes okuduğu and the reader appears as çocuğun.
• çocuğun okuyan kitap — not Turkish. Putting okuyan on an object-headed clause simply fails.

The head noun is the subject

Whatever noun the participle sits in front of is read as the subject of the verb — the one doing it. In koşan çocuk the child is the one running, and in gelen adam the man is the one coming. The participle never turns the head noun into the thing acted on.

The clause may carry its own object, and that object stands inside the phrase, in front of the participle: kitap okuyan çocuk is "the child who is reading a book". Here çocuk is still the subject — the reader — while kitap is the object of the reading. The head noun is the actor throughout.

The form carries no tense

The subject participle says nothing about when the action happens; the surrounding sentence supplies the time. gelen adam can be "the man who comes", "the man who is coming", or "the man who came" — gelen itself is the same form in every case, and only context tells them apart.