Kuş yerde ölü bulundu.

• kuş = bird
• yerde = on the ground / on the floor / in a place
• ölü = dead
• bulundu = was found

So the sentence literally comes out as something like Bird on-the-ground dead was-found, which natural English expresses as The bird was found dead on the ground.

Because -de / -da is the locative ending, meaning in / on / at.

• yer = place, ground, floor
• yerde = in/on/at the place, often on the ground or on the floor in this kind of sentence

So yerde tells you the location where the bird was found.

This is a very common question, because the two forms look similar but mean very different things:

• ölü = dead (an adjective)
• öldü = died (a past-tense verb)

In Kuş yerde ölü bulundu, ölü describes the condition of the bird when it was found: it was found dead.

If you said Kuş yerde öldü, that would mean The bird died on the ground.
That is a different idea: not being found, but the action of dying.

Bulundu is the past tense of bulunmak.

In this sentence, it means was found.

This is related to the verb bulmak = to find.
The form bulunmak often works like a passive or passive-like form:

• Bir kuş buldum. = I found a bird.
• Kuş bulundu. = The bird was found.

So Kuş yerde ölü bulundu means the bird is the thing that was found.

Not always. Bulunmak can also mean to be located / to be present / to be situated.

For example:

• Müze şehir merkezinde bulunuyor. = The museum is located in the city center.

But in Kuş yerde ölü bulundu, the meaning is clearly was found, not just was located, because ölü gives the sense of a discovered condition.

Turkish does not have articles like English a/an and the.

So kuş can mean:

• a bird
• the bird
• sometimes just bird in a general sense

The exact meaning depends on context. In this sentence, English will usually translate it as the bird or a bird, depending on the situation.

Because Turkish normally places the finite verb at the end of the sentence.

So:

• Kuş = subject
• yerde = location
• ölü = description of the bird’s state
• bulundu = main verb at the end

This end position for the verb is one of the most basic Turkish sentence patterns.

Ölü is an adjective describing the bird’s state at the time it was found.

In English, this is similar to:

• The bird was found dead.
• He was found unconscious.
• They found the door open.

So ölü is not the main verb. It is a descriptive complement telling you in what condition the bird was found.

Yes, Turkish word order is flexible, although the verb usually stays at the end.

For example, these can all work with slightly different emphasis:

• Kuş yerde ölü bulundu.
• Kuş ölü yerde bulundu.
• Yerde ölü kuş bulundu.

But they are not all exactly the same in focus.

• Kuş yerde ölü bulundu focuses on the bird and then tells where and in what state it was found.
• Yerde ölü kuş bulundu is closer to A dead bird was found on the ground.

So the original sentence is natural, but word order can shift depending on what the speaker wants to emphasize.

Because here it is just an adjective directly describing kuş.

Turkish adjectives do not change form to agree with nouns the way adjectives do in some languages. So:

• ölü kuş = dead bird
• ölü kediler = dead cats
• ölü insanlar = dead people

The adjective ölü stays the same.

It depends on context.

yer is a broad word that can mean:

• place
• ground
• floor
• spot/location

So yerde might be understood as:

• on the ground
• on the floor
• in that place

In a sentence about a bird, English often chooses on the ground, but the Turkish word itself is a bit broader.

The grammatical subject is kuş.

Even though English translates this with a passive idea (was found), in Turkish the sentence is still built around kuş as the thing being talked about.

So the sentence is about the bird:

• what happened to it? → it was found
• where? → yerde
• in what condition? → ölü

No.

• Kuş öldü. = The bird died.
• Kuş yerde ölü bulundu. = The bird was found dead on the ground.

The second sentence does not directly say when or where it died. It only says that when it was found, it was dead, and it was on the ground.

That leaves open possibilities such as:

• it died there
• it died earlier and was later found there

A simple approximation is:

koosh yehr-deh uh-luh boo-loon-doo

A few notes:

• ş sounds like English sh
• ü is a front rounded vowel, not exactly like normal English u
• ö is also a front rounded vowel, somewhat like the vowel in German schön or French peu

So:

• Kuş ≈ koosh
• ölü ≈ uh-luh with rounded vowels
• bulundu ≈ boo-loon-doo

Yes. That would mean A dead bird was found on the ground or The dead bird was found on the ground.

The difference is mainly in structure and emphasis:

• Kuş yerde ölü bulundu = The bird was found dead on the ground
• Ölü kuş yerde bulundu = A/The dead bird was found on the ground

The first version emphasizes the state discovered.
The second version packages dead bird as a noun phrase from the beginning.