Breakdown of Odanın tasarımı için ya mavi perde ya da yeşil duvar kâğıdı almamız lazımdı.
oda
room
almak
to take, to buy
mavi
blue
yeşil
green
Questions & Answers about Odanın tasarımı için ya mavi perde ya da yeşil duvar kâğıdı almamız lazımdı.
I see ya... ya da... here. Could we have used just ya... ya... without the da?
Yes! In Turkish, ya... ya... and ya... ya da... both mean "either... or...". Adding da to the second part is very common and emphasizes the second option a bit more, but both are grammatically correct and mean the exact same thing.
Why does duvar kâğıdı (wallpaper) have an -ı at the end, but mavi perde (blue curtain) doesn't have an extra ending?
Mavi perde is an adjective describing a noun, so it doesn't take any extra endings. But duvar kâğıdı (literally "wall paper") is made of two nouns. In Turkish, when you join two nouns like this to make a new concept (a noun compound), you must add a possessive suffix like -ı, -i, -u, or -ü to the second word.
How does almamız lazımdı translate to "we had to buy"?
To say someone "needs to" do something, you use a verbal noun (the verb plus -ma or -me) with a personal possessive ending, followed by lazım. Here, al-ma-mız literally means "our buying". So almamız lazım is "we need to buy". To make it past tense ("we had to buy"), you just add the past tense suffix -dı to the end of lazım, making it lazımdı.
Why is it odanın tasarımı instead of just oda tasarımı?