English makes no grammatical distinction between "He is rich" (I saw his mansion) and "He is rich" (someone told me so). Turkish does. Just as the verbal suffix -mIş marks an action as indirectly known — heard, inferred, or freshly discovered — the copula has its own evidential form, -(y)mIş, that does the same for states. O zenginmiş does not just mean "he is rich"; it means "he's rich — so I'm told / so it appears," and crucially it signals that you did not witness the wealth directly. This is one of the most distinctively Turkish features of the whole copular system.
What -(y)mIş actually means
The label "evidential" (or "reportative," or "indirective") points at the heart of it: -(y)mIş marks the source of your knowledge as indirect. Three readings fall out of that single meaning:
- Hearsay — you were told: Yeni komşumuz doktormuş "Our new neighbor is a doctor (I hear)."
- Inference — you deduce from evidence: Yerler ıslak, dışarısı yağmurluymuş "The floor's wet — it must be rainy outside."
- Surprise / mirativity — you've just discovered something contrary to expectation: Aa, sen Türkçe biliyormuşsun! "Oh, you know Turkish! (I had no idea)."
What unites them is that none involves direct, witnessed knowledge. If you had seen the rain yourself, you'd reach for the plain copula — dışarısı yağmurlu "it's rainy out" (present) or yağmurluydu (past) — never the evidential; -(y)mIş is precisely what you use when your information is secondhand or freshly inferred.
Müdür çok sertmiş, herkes ondan çekiniyormuş.
The manager is apparently very strict — everyone's wary of him (so I'm told).
Demek o kadar zenginmiş, hiç belli etmiyor.
So he's rich, it turns out — he doesn't show it at all.
Yeni restoran çok güzelmiş, gidenler çok beğenmiş.
The new restaurant is supposedly very nice; people who went really liked it.
The form: -(y)mIş with four-way harmony and buffer y
Structurally -(y)mIş behaves exactly like the past copula -(y)DI. The I harmonizes four ways (mış / miş / muş / müş), and a buffer y appears after a vowel. Unlike -(y)DI, the m never hardens — there is no t variant.
| Person | After consonant (zengin) | After vowel (hasta) | Meaning |
|---|---|---|---|
| ben (I) | zenginmişim | hastaymışım | I'm rich/sick (apparently) |
| sen (you, sg.) | zenginmişsin | hastaymışsın | you're … (it seems) |
| o (he/she/it) | zenginmiş | hastaymış | he/she is … (apparently) |
| biz (we) | zenginmişiz | hastaymışız | we're … (it seems) |
| siz (you, pl.) | zenginmişsiniz | hastaymışsınız | you're … (it seems) |
| onlar (they) | zenginmişler | hastaymışlar | they're … (apparently) |
The personal endings here are the -(y)Im set from the present copula (-im, -sin, -iz, -siniz), attached after -mIş. The first-person zenginmişim literally stacks "rich" + "evidential" + "I am." After a vowel, the buffer y opens the suffix: hasta → hastaymış, araba → arabaymış, evde → evdeymiş.
Hastaymışsın, neden söylemedin? Sana çorba getireyim.
You're sick (I hear) — why didn't you say so? Let me bring you some soup.
Toplantı iptal olmuş, herkes evdeymiş bugün.
The meeting got cancelled, apparently; everyone's home today.
Meğer ben yıllarca yanlış biliyormuşum, doğrusu buymuş.
It turns out I'd known it wrong for years — this is the correct one.
The interesting first person: surprise about yourself
Why would you use an indirect evidential about yourself (zenginmişim, yanlış biliyormuşum)? Because the evidential can mark dawning realization — discovering a truth about your own state that you weren't consciously aware of. Çok yorgunmuşum "I'm (it turns out) really tired" is something you say when you sit down and only then feel the exhaustion. English captures this with "it turns out" or "apparently I…"
Demek bunca zamandır seni özlemişim, görünce çok sevindim.
So I've missed you all this time, it turns out — I was so glad to see you.
doğruymuş, yorgunmuş, evdeymiş — the everyday cases
In practice you'll hear -(y)mIş constantly in three situations: relaying gossip, reacting to news, and softening a claim you can't personally vouch for.
Yarın hava yağmurluymuş, şemsiyeni al.
The weather's supposed to be rainy tomorrow — take your umbrella.
Söylediğin doğruymuş, ben de sonradan öğrendim.
What you said turned out to be true; I found out later too.
Combining with the past: -mIş + idi and -(y)DI + miş
The evidential and the past copula can combine, and the order encodes different meanings — a subtlety worth flagging honestly rather than glossing over. Zenginmiş (present evidential) → zengin değilmiş (negated). To put a reported state explicitly in the past you'll most often hear the past form simply standing on its own evidential reading in context, or the compound -mIş idi → -mIşti used for the verbal pluperfect. For copular states, learners at B1 should master the plain present evidential first; the layered past-evidential is rarer and context usually disambiguates.
O sıralarda çok gençmiş, daha yirmisinde bile değilmiş.
At that time he was very young, apparently — not even twenty yet.
Common mistakes
❌ O zenginmiş.
Wrong reading: NOT 'he was rich.' -mIş here isn't a past tense.
✅ O zenginmiş.
Correct reading: 'he IS rich, apparently / so I hear.'
❌ Hastamış.
Incorrect — hasta ends in a vowel, so the buffer y is required: hastaymış.
✅ Hastaymış.
He's sick, apparently.
❌ Yorgunmiş.
Incorrect — yorgun is back and rounded, so harmony gives muş: yorgunmuş.
✅ Yorgunmuş.
He's tired, apparently.
❌ Sen öğretmenmiş.
Incorrect — the person ending is missing; with sen 'you' it's öğretmenmişsin.
✅ Sen öğretmenmişsin.
You're a teacher, it turns out.
❌ Gözlerimle gördüm, dışarısı yağmurluymuş.
Odd — if you saw it yourself, don't use the evidential; use the plain/witnessed form: dışarısı yağmurlu.
✅ Gözlerimle gördüm, dışarısı yağmurlu.
I saw it with my own eyes — it's rainy outside.
The two big errors are treating -(y)mIş as a past tense and using it for things you witnessed directly. It is about how you know, not when it happened — see evidentiality in discourse.
Key takeaways
- -(y)mIş is the evidential copula: it marks a state as hearsay, inference, or surprise, never as directly witnessed fact. O zenginmiş = "he's rich, apparently."
- It is not a past tense — it usually refers to a present state; the suffix encodes your source of knowledge, mirroring the verbal -mIş.
- Form: four-way harmony (mış / miş / muş / müş) plus buffer y after a vowel (hasta → hastaymış), then the present-copula person endings (-im, -sin, -iz, -siniz).
- First-person -mIşIm expresses dawning self-realization: çok yorgunmuşum "it turns out I'm really tired."
- Don't use it for things you saw yourself; that calls for the plain or past copula. For the discourse logic of evidentiality, see evidentiality in discourse and the copula overview.
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- The Evidential Past -mIş (Reportative/Inferential)A2 — The evidential past -mIş (gelmiş 'apparently came', yağmur yağmış 'it evidently rained') marks an event as known by hearsay, inference, or fresh surprise rather than direct witness — the single most distinctively Turkish feature for English speakers.
- The Copula System: 'To Be' Without a VerbA1 — Turkish has no verb 'to be' to conjugate; instead a set of endings — plus the defective particle i- for the past, evidential, and conditional — cliticizes onto the predicate, and the present 'is' is often nothing at all.
- Evidentiality as a Stance ResourceB2 — How Turkish speakers exploit the -DI / -mIş contrast to manage commitment and responsibility — -DI to vouch as an eyewitness, -mIş to distance yourself ('I only heard it') for gossip, reporting, and tactfully dodging blame.
- Past Copula: -(y)DI / idiA2 — To say 'was/were' with a noun, adjective, or location, Turkish attaches the past copula i-DI, which cliticizes as -(y)DI onto the predicate: öğretmendim 'I was a teacher', evdeydik 'we were at home'.