Did you just negate my causative?

We have a winner! In my last post I posed a linguistic puzzle, which was solved by clever reader Jane. Well done! For the rest of you, the second clause in the first sentence was made negative by inserting -me after the verb stem. And yes, native speakers also think these words were kind of long, but not outrageously so. I've observed native speakers many times stop in the middle of a word as they think about how they are going to end it.

Jane had the great idea of adding a sound clip so you non-Turkish speakers out there could hear what those megawords sound like. So I asked our IB secretary Hande to give us a reading, and this is what we got: Download mukemmel_1.mp3

Even though she reads Turkish very quickly, I thought I detected a slip. We listened together, and sure enough, she said
mükemmelleştiremediklerimizden,
which is, like, a totally different word. Well, sort of: before the notorıous -me negator suffix she had inserted an -e-, so that the word comes out meaning one of those whose houses we were not able to perfect.  So here is the recording of the sentence as it was printed:
Download mukemmel_2.mp3

Here's the morphology of the word (and just remember this is automatic for native speakers):

mükemmel  : perfect, awesome (borrowed from Arabic), can stand alone as an adjective;
-leş- : a verb aspect which denotes process, as in becoming awesome
-tir- : causative aspect
-me- : negative
-dik- : past participle
-ler-: plural
-imiz- : first person plural genitive case
-den- :ablative case, here like the partitive case
-mi- : yes/no question marker
-siniz  : second personal plural nominative case; many old school Turkish grammarians tack the 'misiniz' onto the previous word

If you're curious about less studied languages, see this blog post from a few months ago:

The sound of a vanishing language.

Comments

[Jane Krauss]

You make me feel smart! Thanks for adding the audio, wonderful! And this REALLY cracked me up! "Even though she reads Turkish very quickly, I thought I detected a slip. We listened together, and sure enough, she said
mükemmelleştiremediklerimizden,
which is, like, a totally different word." Like, totally!