Breakdown of Dünden beri büyük çadır bile ıslak.
büyük
big
dün
yesterday
beri
since
çadır
tent
bile
even
ıslak
wet
Questions & Answers about Dünden beri büyük çadır bile ıslak.
Why does bile come after büyük çadır instead of at the beginning of the sentence like "even" does in English?
In Turkish, the emphatic particle bile (even) always comes immediately after the word or phrase it emphasizes. Because the sentence means "even the big tent", bile must be placed right after the noun phrase büyük çadır.
Why do we need the -den ending on dün (yesterday) here?
The word beri (since) is a postposition that always requires the preceding noun to take the ablative case (the "from" ending, -den or -dan). Therefore, "since yesterday" is formed as dünden beri.
What would happen if we moved bile to come right after dünden beri?
Because bile emphasizes whatever comes right before it, moving it changes the sentence's focus. If you wrote Dünden beri bile büyük çadır ıslak, it would mean "Even since yesterday the big tent is wet," emphasizing the time rather than the tent itself.
There is no verb like "has been" or "is" in this sentence. How does that work?
This is a nominal sentence, meaning it uses an adjective (ıslak) instead of an action verb as the main predicate. In the third person (he/she/it), the "to be" suffix is frequently omitted in Turkish. While the Turkish literally reads "is wet", the phrase dünden beri (since yesterday) requires us to translate it into English using the present perfect tense: "has been wet".
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