Questions & Answers about Kız mayoyu seçiyor.
How do we know the sentence means "the swimsuit" and not just "a swimsuit"?
In Turkish, there is no separate word for "the". Instead, when a direct object is a specific thing being acted upon, we add the accusative case suffix to the noun. Here, the base word mayo (swimsuit) takes a suffix to become mayoyu, marking it as the specific swimsuit being chosen. If she were choosing any random swimsuit, the sentence would simply be Kız bir mayo seçiyor.
Where does the "y" come from in mayoyu?
The base word is mayo, which ends in a vowel. The accusative suffix we need to add is -u, which is also a vowel. In Turkish, you usually cannot put two vowels right next to each other. To fix this, we insert the buffer consonant -y- between them. So the math is mayo + y + u = mayoyu.
How is the verb seçiyor built?
The dictionary form of the verb is seçmek (to choose). To make it present continuous (something happening right now), we take the root seç- and add the suffix -iyor. Thanks to vowel harmony, the front vowel e in seç- matches with the i in the suffix, giving us seçiyor.
Why is the verb at the very end of the sentence?
Turkish follows a Subject-Object-Verb (SOV) word order. The subject doing the action (Kız) comes first, the object receiving the action (mayoyu) goes in the middle, and the verb (seçiyor) is placed at the very end.
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