Breakdown of Onlar düğünden önce ayrı evlerde yaşamış.
ev
house
onlar
they
yaşamak
to live / to experience / to undergo
önce
before / first / firstly
düğün
wedding
ayrı
separate, apart
Questions & Answers about Onlar düğünden önce ayrı evlerde yaşamış.
Why does this sentence use yaşamış instead of the regular past tense yaşadılar?
The -mış suffix is the inferential or reported past tense. It is used for things you did not see yourself but heard from someone else, or inferred. Here, it adds the meaning of 'Apparently they lived...' or 'I heard they lived...', showing that the speaker found out about it later rather than witnessing it.
The subject is Onlar (they), so shouldn't the verb have a plural ending like yaşamışlar?
It can, but it is optional! In Turkish, if you explicitly use the plural pronoun onlar, you are allowed to drop the plural suffix -lar on the verb. Both Onlar ... yaşamış and Onlar ... yaşamışlar are perfectly correct and mean the exact same thing.
Why does düğün (wedding) have the -den ending before önce?
To say 'before a noun' in Turkish, you must attach the ablative case ending (-dan or -den) to the noun. So düğünden önce acts a bit like 'prior from the wedding'. You use this pattern for any noun, like işten önce (before work) or kahvaltıdan önce (before breakfast).
How would I turn this sentence into a question using the -mış mı pattern we are learning?
You would add the question particle mı right after the verb. The sentence would become Onlar düğünden önce ayrı evlerde yaşamış mı? This is how you ask someone to confirm a rumor or a past event that neither of you witnessed directly.
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