Questions & Answers about Yaşlı kadın kasaba yürüyor.
Why does the word for butcher, kasap, change to kasaba in this sentence?
This is an example of consonant mutation. When you add a suffix that starts with a vowel, like the direction suffix -a (meaning to), hard consonants at the end of a word often change to softer ones. Here, the hard p in kasap changes to a soft b, making it kasaba (to the butcher).
I looked up kasaba and it means town. Does this sentence mean walking to the town?
That is a great catch, but no! The word for town is indeed kasaba, but if she were walking to the town, we would need to add the direction suffix -ya to it, making it kasabaya. In this sentence, kasaba is the mutated form of kasap (butcher) plus the -a suffix (to).
Why doesn't Yaşlı kadın have a suffix to show it means 'The old woman' instead of just 'Old woman'?
Turkish does not have a separate word for 'the'. When a noun is the subject of the sentence doing the action, like kadın (woman) is doing the walking here, it stays in its plain dictionary form. You usually know it means 'the' old woman rather than 'an' old woman from the context of the sentence.
How does the word yaşlı get its meaning?