Folktale Excerpt: The Storytelling -mIş (B1) | Turkish Grammar

There is one tense that, the moment a Turkish listener hears it, signals “a story is beginning”: the evidential -mIş. It is the tense of things you did not witness yourself — hearsay, legend, the fairy-tale world. Every Turkish folktale opens with a near-ritual line built on it. The opening below is a short traditional, anonymous folk narrative in the public-domain Keloğlan style — the bald-headed trickster boy of Turkish folklore. The formulaic opening (Bir varmış, bir yokmuş...) and the character are traditional and unattributed; this short passage retells that stock opening and is free of any modern author's copyright. Read it for the rhythm of narrative -mIş, then study how converbs chain the action together.

The opening formula

Bir varmış, bir yokmuş.

Once there was, once there wasn't.

This is the most famous sentence in Turkish folklore, and it is pure grammar magic. Var (“there is”) and yok (“there isn't”) each take the evidential copula -mış, giving “there reportedly was / there reportedly wasn't”. The paradox — there both was and wasn't — is the storyteller's wink: this is a tale, suspend your disbelief. No first-person witness is claimed, and that is the whole point of verbs/evidential-mis.

Evvel zaman içinde, kalbur saman içinde, bir köyde Keloğlan adında bir delikanlı yaşarmış.

Long ago, in a sieve full of straw, in a village there lived a young man named Keloğlan.

The nonsense rhyme kalbur saman içinde (“inside the sieve, inside the straw”) is a traditional decorative tag — it means nothing literally; it is there for the rhyme with zaman içinde. The verb is yaşarmış: the aorist yaşar (“lives, used to live”) plus evidential -mış, a combined form meaning “he is said to have lived (as a habit)”. This stacking of aorist + -mış is how folktales express ongoing, background past situations that the teller did not see; the mechanics are in verbs/past-of-tenses.

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The -mIş in a folktale is not really “evidence” anymore — it is a genre marker. Once the opening sets the -mIş frame, every following verb tends to stay in -mIş, and the listener stops translating it as “apparently” and simply hears “this is the story world”. This narrative use is the dominant one in complex/evidential-in-narrative.

The story gets going

Keloğlan annesiyle yaşar, çok fakirlermiş ama hiç dertlenmezmiş.

Keloğlan lived with his mother; they were very poor but never worried.

Watch the evidential spread across the clause. Fakirlermiş = fakir (“poor”) + plural + the evidential copula -miş: “they were (reportedly) poor”. Then dertlenmezmiş = the negative aorist dertlenmez (“does not fret”) + -miş: “he never used to fret”. Both the adjective predicate and the verb wear -mIş, keeping the whole scene inside the hearsay frame. The instrumental annesiyle (“with his mother”) shows how Turkish folds “with” into the noun by suffix, not by a separate preposition.

Bir gün anası ona seslenmiş: oğlum, evde yiyecek kalmadı, demiş.

One day his mother called out to him: “My son, there's no food left in the house,” she said.

Now the plot moves with a single witnessed-less past event: seslenmiş (“she called out”, reportedly). Inside the quote, however, the mother is speaking from her own experience, so she uses the plain past: kalmadı (“none is left”) — direct, definite, first-hand. This is a crucial folktale rhythm: the narrator's frame is -mIş, but characters quoted in direct speech drop back to the ordinary past -dI. The reporting verb demiş (“she said”) returns us to the narrator's hearsay frame.

Keloğlan hiç oralı olmamış, başını kaşıyıp gülmüş.

Keloğlan paid no attention at all, scratched his head and laughed.

Here come the converbs that drive folk narrative. Kaşıyıp = kaşımak (“to scratch”) + the -ip converb (“having scratched, and...”), which chains directly onto gülmüş (“he laughed”, reportedly). One -mIş at the end of the chain carries the evidential meaning for both actions — you do not repeat it on the converb. This is the engine of Turkish storytelling: a string of -ip / -arak converbs, then one fully tensed verb to close the sentence. See non-finite/converbs-overview.

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Mark tense and evidentiality only on the last verb of a converb chain. In başını kaşıyıp gülmüş, the -mIş sits on gülmüş alone and scopes back over kaşıyıp too. Adding -mIş to the converb (kaşımış gülmüş) breaks the chain into two clumsy clauses — the converb stays bare.

Eline bir torba alıp şehre doğru yola koyulmuş.

He took a sack in his hand and set off toward the town.

Another converb chain: alıp (“having taken”) leads into yola koyulmuş (the idiom yola koyulmak, “to set off on a journey”, here in reported past). The postpositional phrase şehre doğru (“toward the town”) uses doğru (“toward”), which governs the dative şehre. Notice the action keeps marching forward through these light, breathless -ip links — exactly the texture an English translation flattens into a chain of “and”s.

Why folktales feel “distant”

Yolda yürürken karşısına yaşlı bir adam çıkmış.

As he walked along the road, an old man appeared before him.

Yürürken = yürü(mek) (“to walk”) + the simultaneity converb -ken (“while walking”), compressing a whole “as he walked” clause into one word. The main event çıkmış (“appeared”, reportedly) stays in the narrative -mIş. The dative-marked karşısına (“before/in front of him”) literally means “to his front” — a possessed spatial noun, not a preposition. The cumulative effect of all these -mIş endings is a soft, dreamlike distance: nothing is asserted as witnessed fact, which is exactly the emotional register of a fairy tale.

Adam ona, sana bir sır vereceğim, demiş, ama önce bir iş yapmalısın.

The man said to him, “I'll tell you a secret, but first you must do a task.”

Inside the quote the old man speaks in the future (vereceğim, “I will give”) and a necessitative (yapmalısın, “you must do”) — both first-hand, present-tense-of-speech forms, because a character experiences his own words directly. The narrator's demiş wraps it back into hearsay. This switch between the narrator's -mIş frame and characters' direct forms is the single most important habit to internalize for reading folktales fluently.

Common mistakes

❌ Bir gün anası ona seslendi, sonra Keloğlan güldü.

Wrong register for a folktale — the plain past -dI sounds like a personal eyewitness report, breaking the tale frame.

✅ Bir gün anası ona seslenmiş, sonra Keloğlan gülmüş.

One day his mother called out to him, then Keloğlan laughed.

❌ Keloğlan başını kaşımış ve gülmüş.

Stilted — chaining two full -mIş verbs with “ve” is clumsy; folk narrative uses the -ip converb.

✅ Keloğlan başını kaşıyıp gülmüş.

Keloğlan scratched his head and laughed.

❌ Annem, evde yiyecek kalmamış, demiş.

Wrong — a character reporting her own kitchen would use the first-hand past “kalmadı”, not the hearsay -mış.

✅ Annem, evde yiyecek kalmadı, demiş.

His mother said, “There's no food left in the house.”

Key takeaways

This opening is a traditional, anonymous, public-domain folktale in the Keloğlan style; the Bir varmış bir yokmuş formula and the character are stock folklore, not any modern author's work.
The evidential -mIş is the genre signal for storytelling — once set, it spreads to nearly every narrator verb and reads simply as “story world”, not “apparently”.
The aorist + -mIş combination (yaşarmış) gives habitual background past inside the tale frame.
Converbs (-ip in kaşıyıp, -ken in yürürken) chain actions; you mark tense/evidentiality only once, on the final verb.
Characters quoted in direct speech drop to first-hand forms (the plain past -dI, future, necessitative); the narrator's reporting verb returns the frame to -mIş.

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