All articles

Turkish turns a verb into a noun three ways — a dictionary infinitive, an action noun, and a manner noun — and picking the right one is most of the skill.

Three ways to make a noun from a verb

Turkish has three ways to make a noun out of a verb, and they are not interchangeable. From the single stem yüz ("swim") come yüzmek, the dictionary infinitive you look up and use after a modal; yüzme, the action noun that names the activity and behaves like any other noun; and yüzüş, the manner noun that names how the action is done or a single instance of it.

yüzmek is the citation form — "to swim", or "swimming" in the abstract. yüzme is "swimming" as a thing you can possess, put in a case, or build a compound around. yüzüş is closer to "a stroke" or "a style of swimming" — a reading of how the action goes, not just what it is.

Two-way harmony for the infinitive and action noun

The infinitive -mek and the action noun -me share one two-way harmony. Their vowel copies only the front or back quality of the last stem vowel; rounding plays no part, so all four front vowels behave alike and all four back vowels behave alike. A front stem like yüz takes -mek and -me, giving yüzmek and yüzme; a back stem like oku takes -mak and -ma, giving okumak and okuma.

Because only frontness counts, each ending has just two shapes: -mek against -mak for the infinitive, and -me against -ma for the action noun.

Four-way harmony and a buffer for the manner noun

The manner noun -ış harmonises four ways, matching both the frontness and the rounding of the last stem vowel — the pattern of the high-vowel endings. So bak gives bakış, gül gives gülüş, and yüz gives yüzüş.

When the stem already ends in a vowel, a buffer -y- slides in so the two vowels never meet: yürü ("walk") takes the buffered -yüş and becomes yürüyüş. That buffered column is the third one in the table.

Read each one back to its verb and the derivation is plain: bakmak to bakış, gülmek to gülüş, yürümek to yürüyüş.

The three side by side

Put all three on the one stem yüz and the division of labour is clear: the infinitive names the action, the action noun turns it into a thing, and the manner noun names the way of doing it.

The verb decides: infinitive or action noun

Which verbal noun you reach for is often fixed by the verb that governs it. istemek ("to want") takes the bare infinitive: Yüzmek istiyorum is "I want to swim", with yüzmek straight after it. sevmek ("to like") takes the action noun instead, and in the accusative: Yüzmeyi severim is "I like swimming", where yüzmeyi is yüzme carrying the accusative ending.

So the same idea — "swimming" — surfaces as yüzmek under one verb and as yüzmeyi under another. The safest habit is to learn the governing verb together with the form it calls for.

When the action noun looks like a command

The bare action noun -me is spelled exactly like the negative command, and the two share every letter. yüzme is both the noun "swimming" and the order "don't swim"; gelme is both "coming" and "don't come", the negative of gel. Nothing in the spelling tells them apart.

The sentence does the separating, and in speech so does stress: the noun yüzme stresses its last syllable, the command its first. Whenever yüzme stands next to a case ending or a possessive, it can only be the noun.

The action noun behaves like any noun

Because -me makes an ordinary noun, it does everything a noun does. It takes a possessive — yüzme becomes yüzmem, "my swimming". It takes a case, such as the accusative yüzmeyi. And it heads compounds, which is where learners most often slip.

A swimming pool is a yüzme havuzu — the action noun yüzme joined to havuz ("pool"). The dictionary infinitive cannot do this job, and yüzmek havuzu is not Turkish. Where a verb-idea modifies a noun in a compound, it is the -me form that appears. The same shape names plain activities on their own, as in okuma, "reading".

The manner noun names a way or an instance

The -ış noun does not name the activity in the abstract; it names the manner of the action or a single instance of it. bakış is "a look" or "a glance", the way of looking; gülüş is "a smile", the way of laughing; yürüyüş is "a walk" or "a march", the gait or the event. Each is countable in a way the action noun is not.

They are built straight from the verb — bakmak to bakış, gülmek to gülüş, yürümek to yürüyüş — and many are everyday vocabulary in their own right.

Frozen forms that became plain nouns

Some verbal nouns have hardened into everyday vocabulary and lost sight of the verb behind them. yemek is the infinitive "to eat", and also simply "food" or "a meal". dondurma is an action noun that now means "ice cream". giriş and çıkış are manner nouns that have settled as "entrance" and "exit" — the words on every door.

Treat these as ordinary vocabulary. The pattern that built them still shows through, and you learn each as a fixed word rather than rebuilding it each time.