In Turkish, when you want to talk about a specific portion of a group—like "all of them", "most of them", or "none of them"—you use indefinite pronouns that end in a 3rd person possessive suffix.
Here are the most common indefinite pronouns used to describe quantities:
- hepsi (all of them)
- çoğu (most of them) — Notice how the "k" in "çok" softens to "ğ".
- bazıları (some of them)
- birkaçı (a few of them)
- hiçbiri (none of them)
To specify what group you are talking about, put the group noun in the genitive case (using -In), followed by the pronoun. This works exactly like a standard possessive noun phrase (e.g., ürünlerin hepsi means "all of the products").
| All of these products are very high quality. | Bu ürünlerin hepsi çok kaliteli. |
| Most of the participants finished the survey, but a few of them did not. | Katılımcıların çoğu anketi bitirdi ama birkaçı bitirmedi. |
| None of these packagings are beautiful. | Bu ambalajların hiçbiri güzel değil. |
Adding Case Suffixes
Because these pronouns already end in a possessive suffix, if you need to add another case ending—like the accusative case for a direct object—you must insert the buffer letter -n-.
- hepsi -> hepsini (all of them)
- bazıları -> bazılarını (some of them)
- hiçbiri -> hiçbirini (none of them)
This is a very common structure when a focus group evaluates or rates (puanlamak) a set of items, as you are usually doing something to "some of them" or "none of them".
| The participants tried the products and liked some of them. | Katılımcılar ürünleri deneyip bazılarını beğendi. |
| We rated all of these brands. | Bu markaların hepsini puanladık. |
| The customers rated the products but did not like any of them. | Müşteriler ürünleri puanladı ama hiçbirini beğenmedi. |