Breakdown of Ben telefonumdan fotoğrafı siliyorum.
Questions & Answers about Ben telefonumdan fotoğrafı siliyorum.
We want to express from my phone, so we need two suffixes:
1) -um for “my” (possessive), turning telefon into telefonum (“my phone”).
2) -dan for the ablative case (“from”), giving telefonumdan.
Order matters: in Turkish you add the possessive first, then the case ending.
There are indeed no separate words for the or a. Instead:
- Indefinite objects (a/an) are unmarked: kitap okuyorum (“I’m reading a book”).
- Definite objects (the) take the accusative: kitabı okuyorum (“I’m reading the book”).
siliyorum is the present continuous (“I am deleting”).
- sildim would be the simple past (“I deleted”).
- silerim is the simple present/habitual or sometimes future (“I delete/I will delete”).
Since the action is happening right now, we use siliyorum.
1) Base verb sil- (“to delete”)
2) Present continuous suffix -iyor- → sil-iyor-
3) First person singular ending -um → sil-iyor-um
You get siliyorum, with vowel harmony and consonant assimilation smoothing the pronunciation.
Yes. Turkish has flexible word order because of case marking. The neutral order is Subject-Object-Verb (Ben telefonumdan fotoğrafı siliyorum), but you could also say:
- Fotoğrafı telefonumdan siliyorum (focus on what you delete)
- Telefonumdan fotoğrafı siliyorum (neutral)
- Ben fotoğrafı telefonumdan siliyorum (emphasize “I”)
You can add birkaç (“a few/some”) before fotoğraf and leave it indefinite:
Telefonumdan birkaç fotoğraf siliyorum.