Pronouns

Kazakh grammar for beginners · Four ways to say "you", one word for "he" and "she"

Kazakh has eight personal pronouns. The second person splits four ways — plain or polite, one person or several — so Kazakh says with a separate word what Turkish leaves to context. The third person splits no ways at all: ol (ол) covers "he", "she" and "it" alike. Then all eight come back as endings on other words, and once the ending is there the pronoun itself can be dropped.

Kazakh has several families of pronoun: words for "this" and "that", question words like "who" and "where", words meaning "everyone" and "nobody". This lesson does the family you need first — the personal pronouns, the words that stand in for the people in a sentence.

A pronoun substitutes for a noun, and Kazakh treats it almost like one: it takes the same case endings a noun takes. There are eight words to learn, and then three things they do: which of them you may say to whom, what the third person deliberately does not tell you, and how a pronoun turns into an ending on another word and then disappears.

The eight personal pronouns

The four ways to say "you"

Two independent choices again, as with the plural: how well you know the person, and how many of them there are. The first and third persons have one word each per column; only the second person fills all four cells.

Turkish makes two of these four distinctions

Turkish has sen for the second person singular and siz for everything else. siz is the second-person plural pronoun, and it is also the word addressed to one person as a mark of respect and courtesy — one form doing two jobs, with the surrounding sentence left to say which.

Kazakh gives each job its own word. sız (сіз) is the polite form addressed to one person and sızder (сіздер) the polite form addressed to several, while sen (сен) and sender (сендер) are the plain pair. So the Kazakh sentence tells you outright what a Turkish sentence leaves you to work out.

Choosing between them is a question about the other person rather than about the language. The plain forms go to a close or intimate friend, or to someone younger than the speaker; the polite forms go to someone older than the speaker or of higher social standing.

ol (ол) does not tell you whether it is a man or a woman

ol (ол) and its possessive form onyñ (оның) are used for all genders. One word does the work of "he", "she" and "it", and one word, olar (олар), the work of "they" — so there is no choice to make and no form to get wrong when you talk about a person whose gender you do not know.

Turkish behaves the same way: o is defined simply as the word for the third person singular, the person or thing being spoken about.

The pronoun becomes an ending

To say "I am a worker" Kazakh puts an ending on the last word of the sentence rather than reaching for a verb "to be" — and that ending is the pronoun itself in suffix form. Men jūmysşymyn (Мен жұмысшымын) is jūmysşy (жұмысшы) "worker" plus an ending that means "I".

There is one ending per pronoun, and every one of the eight is below. The third person is the odd one out: it adds nothing at all, in the singular and in the plural alike, so Ol jūmysşy (Ол жұмысшы) is already a complete sentence.

The vowel of an ending follows harmony, and its first consonant follows the same voiced/voiceless logic you met in the plural — -myn (-мын) after a vowel, -byn (-бын) after z (з) or j (ж), -pyn (-пын) after a voiceless consonant. Two written shapes each time, never four.

And once there is an ending, the pronoun can disappear

Because the ending already names the person, the pronoun in front of it can be left out. Men baramyn (Мен барамын) and bare baramyn (барамын) both mean "I go" — which is why you will meet Kazakh sentences with no visible subject at all.

That works in every person, since every person has an ending of its own. The pair below stays in one person deliberately, so that the only difference between the two lines is the missing word.

The right word, not always the right meaning

baru (бару) "to go" is the same inherited root as Turkish varmak, but the two languages kept different amounts of it: Kazakh kept the broad "go", while Turkish narrowed it to arriving — setting foot in the place you were heading for. That is why the sentence above is giderim and not varırım.

The sound correspondences are reliable about the root and say nothing about the meaning, so check what they hand you.

They decline like nouns, with a few shapes that have to be learned

Pronouns take the same case endings that nouns take, so most of the paradigm will look familiar when cases arrive. The list below takes one pronoun, men (мен), and runs it through its case forms together, rather than showing one case across all eight — the endings are the ordinary noun ones, and it is the pronoun that occasionally misbehaves.

The visible irregularity is the form meaning "to": men (мен) gives mağan (маған) and sen (сен) gives sağan (саған), with a vowel that is nowhere in the pronoun itself. ol (ол) does the same thing, and the remaining five pronouns do not.

Turkish changes the same two vowels in the same two words: the "to" form of ben is bana and of sen is sana. Cases are a later lesson — for now it is enough to know that these will not be regular when you get there.

Every pronoun has a possessive form

Alongside the eight above there is a second set of eight, meaning "my", "your", "his" and so on. Each one is the genitive of its pronoun — the case that answers "whose?", the one menıñ (менің) filled in a moment ago — and here is that row for all eight. The shapes are among the irregularities just mentioned, so take them as they stand rather than trying to build them.

These are the words the next lesson leans on. There they will sit in front of a noun that carries an ending of its own, so learn them now as a block and the next lesson is half done.