Breakdown of Keşke o dükkânı açsaymış da kendi işinin patronu olsaymış.
o
that / he / she / it
iş
work
açmak
to open
patron
boss
de
too, also (de/da) / even if (concessive particle after conditional) / and (linking clauses)
kendi
self
olmak
to become
dükkân
shop
keşke
if only / I wish
Questions & Answers about Keşke o dükkânı açsaymış da kendi işinin patronu olsaymış.
Why use açsaymış instead of açsaydı here?
Both endings express an unfulfilled past wish (usually triggered by keşke). If we used açsaydı, it would mean the speaker directly knows about the situation and is stating the regret. By attaching the inferential -mış to make açsaymış, the speaker is reporting a regret they heard about from someone else: "I hear/Apparently she wishes she had opened..."
If keşke means "if only/I wish", how do we know it's her wish and not the speaker's?
The verbs açsaymış and olsaymış don't have a personal suffix like -ım (first person) or -sın (second person) at the end, which means they conjugate for the third person ("he/she/it"). Because the sentence uses the reported past -mış, we know the speaker is passing along someone else's feelings.
Why is da used to connect the two wishes instead of ve?
In Turkish, da / de is frequently preferred over ve when connecting two verbs, especially when the second action is a natural consequence of the first. Here, becoming the boss (patronu olsaymış) is the direct intended result of opening the shop (açsaymış). It acts similarly to "and so" or "and then".
Can you break down the grammar in kendi işinin patronu?
This is a chained noun phrase (a nested genitive-possessive compound). First, we have kendi işi (her own business), which uses the possessive -i. To link that to patron (boss), we must add the genitive case -nin to the first part (işinin) and a new possessive suffix -u to the second part (patronu). Literally, it translates to "her own business's boss".
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