Breakdown of Uçak kalkış saatine kadar terminalde dua ederim.
Questions & Answers about Uçak kalkış saatine kadar terminalde dua ederim.
Three things happen here:
- saat (hour/time) takes a third-person singular possessive suffix -i, because noun-noun compounds that express “X’s Y” often keep that suffix: kalkış saati (“the departure time”).
- To say “to the time,” add the dative case -e.
- When you attach a vowel (e) to another vowel (i), Turkish inserts a buffer consonant n.
Putting it all together:
saat + -i (possessive) + -n (buffer) + e (dative) = saatine.
kadar means “until” when talking about time (or “as much as” for quantities). It always follows a noun in the dative case (-e/-a):
- beşe kadar = “until five o’clock”
- okul bitinceye kadar = “until school ends”
So saatine kadar = “until the (departure) time.”
terminal = “airport terminal.”
Add the locative suffix -de (meaning “in/on/at”) to get terminalde = “in the terminal.”
Turkish locative endings follow vowel harmony (front vs. back):
- Front vowels (e, i, ö, ü) → -de
- Back vowels (a, ı, o, u) → -da
Because terminal is a borrowed word and many speakers treat it as having front vowels, terminalde is common (though terminalda also appears informally).
ederim is the aorist tense of etmek. In Turkish the aorist can:
- Express a plan/intention (“I’ll…”).
- Describe habitual or general actions.
By using dua ederim, you convey “I’ll be praying (as planned) until then.” - dua ediyorum = “I’m praying (right now)”
- dua edeceğim = “I will pray” (simple future)
Yes. yapmak (“to do/make”) can pair with dua in everyday speech: dua yaparım = “I pray.”
However, dua etmek is more traditional/formal, since dua is an Arabic loanword that naturally collocates with etmek.
Turkish has two common ways to form noun-noun compounds:
- Drop the genitive on the first noun: uçak kalkış saati
- Use genitive + possessive: uçağın kalkış saati
Both are correct; the speaker here chose the shorter, genitive-less version.
Absolutely.
havalimanı = “airport,” so havalimanı + -nda (locative) = havalimanında = “in the airport.”
You’d get: Uçak kalkış saatine kadar havalimanında dua ederim.
Turkish is fairly flexible, but the neutral order is Time → Place → Verb:
- Uçak kalkış saatine kadar (time)
- terminalde (place)
- dua ederim (verb)
You can move elements around, but putting the time clause last sounds odd. For clarity, stick with the usual sequence.