Fay hattı tehlikeli.

to be

Breakdown of Fay hattı tehlikeli.

• tehlikeli: dangerous
• fay hattı: the fault line

Questions & Answers about Fay hattı tehlikeli.

Why is there no article “the” or “a” before fay hattı?

Turkish simply doesn’t have definite or indefinite articles like English does. You state the noun on its own and context tells you if it’s “a” or “the.”

• Fay hattı tehlikeli. can mean “The fault line is dangerous.”
• If you really want to say “A fault line is dangerous,” you could add bir: Bir fay hattı tehlikeli.

What does the -ı in hattı indicate? Is it the accusative case?

No, it’s not the direct-object (accusative) marker here. It’s the 3rd person singular possessive suffix.

• hatt (line) + -ı → hattı literally “its line.”
• fay hattı therefore literally means “the fault’s line” → English “fault line.”

The accusative suffix in Turkish also looks like -ı/-i/-u/-ü, but it usually attaches to the end of a phrase and often has a buffer -y after a vowel: e.g. kitabı (“the book” as object). Here there’s no buffer y, and the context (possession in a compound) is different.

Why isn’t fay in the genitive case, like fayın hattı?

Because fay hattı is a lexicalized compound (a fixed phrase) meaning “fault line.” In regular possession you would say something like bu fayın hattı (“the line of this fault”), but when two nouns combine into a single technical term, Turkish often drops the genitive marking on the first element.