Learn Hardcore Turkish: Büyük mucit Thomas Edison ampulü icat etti. - The great inventor Thomas Edison invented the lightbulb.

Turkish’s default sentence structure is SOV. So you place the subject (Büyük mucit Thomas Edison) first, then the direct object (ampulü), and finally the verb (icat etti). In English it’s SVO, but in Turkish everything comes before the verb.

Why do we say büyük mucit Thomas Edison instead of Thomas Edison büyük mucit?

When you use a descriptive phrase (adjective + common noun) as an apposition to a name, that phrase comes before the proper noun. It’s just like English “the great inventor Thomas Edison.” Reversing it would sound unnatural in Turkish.

Why isn’t there an article equivalent to “the” or “a” before büyük mucit?

Turkish has no definite article (“the”) at all, and its indefinite article “a/an” is bir, which is often omitted unless you really need to emphasize “one of.”
So büyük mucit can mean “the great inventor” or “a great inventor” depending on context.

If I want to say “a great inventor,” should I use bir büyük mucit?

You can, but it’s uncommon. bir marks “one” or “an,” so bir büyük mucit literally means “a single great inventor.” In everyday speech, just büyük mucit is enough to convey “a great inventor.”

Why is the verb icat etti two words? Why not a single verb like in English?

Many Turkish verbs are formed by attaching etmek (“to do/make”) to a noun. Here, icat is the noun “invention” and etmek is the light verb “to do,” so icat etmek = “to invent.” When you conjugate, etmek becomes etti in the past tense.

Why does ampul take the suffix -ü (ampulü) instead of -u to mark the direct object?

The direct-object suffix -(y)I ordinarily follows vowel harmony (-ı, -i, -u, -ü). By the standard rule, ampul (with a final u) might take -u, but it’s a loanword from French and is treated as an exception by many speakers. So you say ampulü; it’s one of those vocabulary items you just memorize.

Why is Thomas Edison not marked with any case ending?

As the subject of the sentence, Thomas Edison is in the nominative case, which is unmarked in Turkish. You only add a suffix if you need genitive, dative, accusative (definite), locative, etc.

Why is the direct object marked with a suffix at all?

In Turkish, you only mark the direct object with -(y)I when it is definite or specific. Since Edison invented the lightbulb (a known, specific object), it gets ampulü. If it had been general (“he invented a lightbulb” in the sense of any prototype), you could leave it unmarked as ampul.