Questions & Answers about Ev büyük ve bahçe yok.
How does bahçe yok translate to "there is no garden"?
The word yok means "non-existent" or "there is not". In Turkish, to say "there is no [something]", you just put the object first, then yok. So, bahçe (garden) followed by yok naturally translates to "there is no garden."
Where is the word for "is" in Ev büyük?
In simple present-tense statements like "The house is big", Turkish usually skips the verb "to be" entirely. You just put the subject (Ev) and the describing word (büyük) side by side to make the sentence.
There is no word for "the" in this sentence. How do we know it means "The house"?
Turkish doesn't have a direct translation for "the". When a word like Ev is placed at the beginning of a sentence as the subject, it is usually understood as specific ("the house"). If you wanted to say "A house is big," you would add the word for one/a: Bir ev büyük.
Why don't we say bir bahçe yok to mean "there is not a garden"?
While saying bir bahçe yok is grammatically possible, it emphasizes the number one, sounding like "there isn't one garden" (maybe there are two!). To simply state that a garden doesn't exist at all, leaving out bir is the most natural way to say it.
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