Mini-Biography: The Historical -DI and -mIş (B2)

A biography is, grammatically, a sustained decision about the past — and Turkish makes that decision twice as interesting as English does, because it forces you to choose between two pasts on every verb. The witnessed/definite -DI marks an event treated as established and documented; the reportative/evidential -mIş marks something received second-hand, legendary, or uncertain. A good Turkish biographer braids the two: documented dates and offices get -DI, while traditions, anecdotes, and disputed details get -mIş. The short life of the architect Mimar Sinan below is original prose, written for this guide; it uses only public-domain biographical facts about a figure who died in 1588, and every construction is authentic to the biographical register. Read it for the tense braid, the date suffixes, and the -DIK relative clauses.

The passage

The biography opens on a documented anchor, so the verb is doğdu (“was born”, plain past -DI) — birth, even if the exact year is uncertain, is treated as an established biographical fact. Note the date marking: 1490 civarında (“around 1490”), where civarında (“in the vicinity of”) softens an approximate year without changing the tense. The izafet chain Kayseri yakınlarındaki bir köy (“a village in the environs of Kayseri”) stacks a place name, the relational noun yakın (“near”) with possessive and locative, and the relativizing -ki — a single noun phrase doing what English needs a prepositional pile-up to do. The title Mimar (“architect”) precedes the name as an honorific, not a suffix.

Two documented events, two passives in the definite past: getirildi (“was brought”, passive of getirmek + -DI) and alındı (“was taken”, passive of almak + -DI). The passive is doing biographical work here — it foregrounds the subject (Sinan) as the one things happened to, leaving the imperial system as the unnamed agent. Crucially, note the apostrophe in İstanbul'a (“to Istanbul”): a proper noun takes its case suffix after an apostrophe, İstanbul'a, never İstanbula — and the dotted İ is the capital of i, distinct from dotless ı. This apostrophe rule is non-negotiable in formal prose; see numbers/dates-calendar for the parallel rule on years.

Now the tense flips to -mIş, and the flip is deliberate. The framing phrase söylenenlere göre (“according to what is said”) flags tradition rather than record, so the verbs go reportative: öğrenmiş (“is said to have learned”) and yönelmiş (“is said to have turned”). The abstract nouns marangozluk (“carpentry”) and mimarlık (“architecture”) use the -lIk suffix that builds occupations and abstractions. The phrase bu sayede (“by this means, thanks to this”) is a fixed connective. The whole sentence sits one notch back from certainty — exactly the distance a careful biographer keeps from a colourful but unverifiable youth.

Back to documented record, back to -DI: oldu (“became”). The year 1538'de shows the apostrophe-plus-locative on a numeral — 1538'de (“in 1538”), with the locative harmonising to -de after the front-vowel reading of the year. The appositive yani saray başmimarı (“that is, the palace's head architect”) uses yani (“that is, i.e.”) to gloss the office, and saray başmimarı is a clean possessive izafet (“head-architect of the palace”). The title Mimarbaşı is capitalised as an office held.

This sentence is a -DIK relative-clause showcase. Yaptığı eserler = “the works that he built” — yap- + the -DIK participle + 3sg possessive -ı, a personal relative clause where the verb agrees with its subject (“he”) by a possessive ending rather than a relative pronoun. The same machinery returns in tamamladığı (“which he completed”): tamamla- + -DIK + possessive, modifying Selimiye Camii. Inside it sits the date 1575'te (apostrophe + locative). The predicate Selimiye Camii'dir carries the assertive copula -DIr (“it is”), typical of reference-style biographical statements, with the apostrophe again on the proper noun Camii'dir. This is the densest construction on the page; the -DIK participle is detailed at verbs/past-di only in passing — the relative-clause mechanics are its own topic.

The tense flips to -mIş once more, triggered by rivayete göre (“according to legend/rumour”). Tasarlamış (“is said to have designed”) keeps the claim at arm’s length, because the detail — designing a masterpiece near the age of a hundred — is the stuff of legend, not the documentary record. The converb yüz yaşına yakınken = “while being close to a hundred years of age”, built on yakın (“near”) plus the simultaneity converb -ken (“while”). The dative yüz yaşına (“to a hundred years”) is governed by yakın, which takes a dative complement. The whole sentence models the biographer’s craft: a vivid claim, honestly down-shifted to reportative.

The biography closes on documented facts, so back to -DI: öldü (“died”) and the passive gömüldü (“was buried”). The year 1588'de and place İstanbul'da both take apostrophe-plus-locative. The relative clause kendi tasarladığı türbe = “the tomb that he himself designed”, with the reflexive kendi (“himself”) reinforcing the -DIK participle tasarladığı. Ending a life on -DI is the convention: death and burial are matters of record, and the witnessed past gives them their settled, final weight.

The braid: when to switch

The framing phrases are the tell. Söylenenlere göre, rivayete göre, anlatıldığına göre (“according to what is recounted”) all license a switch to -mIş, because they explicitly source the claim to tradition. Without such a frame, biographical Turkish defaults to the documented -DI. An English speaker, whose past tense makes no such distinction, tends to flatten everything into one tense — and a biography written entirely in -DI quietly asserts that every legend is verified fact, while one written entirely in -mIş disowns even the birth and death dates. Neither is what a careful writer wants.

Common mistakes

Key takeaways

• This biography is original prose written for this guide, built only from public-domain facts about a figure who died in 1588.
• Biographical Turkish braids two pasts: documented -DI for the record (birth, death, dated offices, passives of events) and reportative -mIş for legend and uncertainty.
• A framing phrase like söylenenlere göre or rivayete göre licenses the switch to -mIş; without one, the default is -DI.
• Dates and proper nouns take an apostrophe before the case suffix: 1538'de, İstanbul'a, Selimiye Camii'dir — and respect dotted İ vs dotless ı.
• -DIK relative clauses (yaptığı eserler, tamamladığı cami, kendi tasarladığı türbe) carry “the X that he Y-ed”, with the verb agreeing by a possessive ending, no relative pronoun.
• The cardinal English-speaker error is a uniform tense — flattening record and legend into one past, which either over-asserts the legends or disowns the facts.