Trenin hızı uçağın hızı kadar yüksek değil.
The train's speed is not as high as the airplane's speed.
Breakdown of Trenin hızı uçağın hızı kadar yüksek değil.
değil
not
uçak
airplane
tren
train
kadar
as ... as; until, up to
Questions & Answers about Trenin hızı uçağın hızı kadar yüksek değil.
How does kadar create the 'as high as' meaning in this sentence?
In Turkish, the postposition kadar comes right after the thing you are comparing to, and is followed by the adjective. Here, we say uçağın hızı kadar yüksek, which literally builds as 'the airplane's speed as high'.
Why do we say uçağın instead of just uçak?
To say 'the airplane's', we need the genitive (owner) suffix. When we add the vowel suffix -ın to uçak, the hard k softens into a ğ. This gives us uçağın.
Why does the word hız (speed) have an -ı attached to it in both halves of the sentence?
The -ı is the third-person possessive suffix, meaning 'its'. In Turkish possessive compounds, both the owner and the owned thing get a suffix. So 'the train's speed' is built as Trenin hızı (the train's speed-its).
Why is değil placed at the very end of the sentence?
In Turkish, the main verb or negator almost always comes at the end. Since this is a descriptive sentence without an action verb, the negative word değil (is not) takes that final position to negate the entire comparison before it.