Breakdown of Melankolik günlerinde geveze insanlardan kaçardı.
insan
person
kaçmak
to run away
gün
day
geveze
talkative (chatty, talks too much)
melankolik
melancholic
Questions & Answers about Melankolik günlerinde geveze insanlardan kaçardı.
Why does günlerinde have an -i- and an -n- before the locative suffix -de?
The -i is the third-person possessive suffix, giving us the meaning "his melancholic days" (it could also be "her" or "their" depending on context). In Turkish, whenever you attach a spatial case suffix (like the locative -de) to a word ending in a third-person possessive suffix, you must use the buffer letter -n-. So it breaks down cleanly as gün-ler-i-n-de (day-s-his-[buffer]-on).
Why use kaçardı instead of the standard past tense kaçtı or past continuous kaçıyordu?
kaçardı combines the aorist suffix (-ar) with the past tense suffix (-dı) to describe a repeated past habit. It translates perfectly to "he would run away" or "he used to run away." If you used kaçtı, it would mean he ran away on one specific occasion. If you used kaçıyordu, it would emphasize that he was running away at a specific interrupted moment in the past.
Why is insanlar in the ablative case (insanlardan) here?
Because of the verb kaçmak. While in English we might simply "avoid people" (using a direct object), the Turkish verb kaçmak means "to escape," "to run away," or "to avoid," and it always requires the ablative case (-dan/-den). You are conceptually running away from someone or something.
This lesson is about the conjunction kâh ... kâh ... (sometimes ... sometimes ...). How could we apply it to a sentence like this?
You can use kâh ... kâh ... to contrast this habit with an opposite one. You place kâh right before the elements that are alternating. For example: Kâh geveze insanlardan kaçardı, kâh onlarla saatlerce konuşurdu. (Sometimes he would run away from talkative people, sometimes he would talk with them for hours.)
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