Learn Turkish

Lesson 103: The positive regular aorist

In this lesson you will learn how to use verbs in the aorist tense. Since the aorist is a complicated tense in Turkish, it is divided into three lessons.

The aorist is a tense that is not very common in other languages. It roughly translates to the English present simple tense, but not always. Be ready to see aorist used for the translation of the English present tense, the English future tense and sometimes even the English past tense. You will first see how the aorist is conjugated, and then we'll show you some of the functions it performs.

The aorist is formed by taking the stem of a verb, appending an r, and then appending a personal ending. If the stem ends in a consonant, a vowel is first added as a buffer letter. This vowel obeys vowel harmony, but depends on the length of the stem. If the stem is monosyllabic, consisting of a single syllable, we add the buffer vowel E. If the stem is polysyllabic, consisting of multiple syllables, we add the buffer vowel İ.

The aorist is used in many situations. Below we list its most common functions, together with examples to make them clear. Note the differences in the suffix between verbs with monosyllabic stems and verbs with polysyllabic stems.