Word
Binaya sızmasına rağmen hiçbir belge bulmadı.
Meaning
Despite infiltrating the building, he found no documents.
Part of speech
sentence
Pronunciation
Course
Breakdown of Binaya sızmasına rağmen hiçbir belge bulmadı.
bina
building
bulmak
to find
belge
document
hiçbir
no / not any (determiner)
Questions & Answers about Binaya sızmasına rağmen hiçbir belge bulmadı.
How does sızmasına rağmen translate to 'despite infiltrating'?
This is the standard way to say 'despite doing an action' in Turkish. You take the short verbal noun sızma (infiltrating), add a possessive suffix to show who is doing it (here, -sı for 'his/her'), and finally add the dative case -a (with the buffer -n-) to make sızmasına. This is because the word rağmen (despite) always requires the preceding word to take the dative case.
Why is it Binaya (with the dative ending -ya) instead of the accusative Binayı?
In English you 'infiltrate' a direct object, but the Turkish verb sızmak literally means 'to leak' or 'to seep'. Therefore, it requires the dative case to show the direction of the movement: leaking into the building.
'Documents' is plural in the English translation. Why isn't it belgeler in Turkish?
Are the -ma in sızmasına and the -ma in bulmadı the same suffix?