çay: tea and its endings

The idea

Çay ends in y, a consonant, and its last vowel is a, a back vowel. So the endings take their back shapes (-lar, -ı, -a, -da, -dan) and the word itself never changes: no softening, no extra letter. çaylar, çayı, çaya, çayda, çaydan, çayım, çayımız.

Examples

• Annem çay içiyor.My mother is drinking tea.Tea in general is a bare object with no accusative: çay içiyorum. Çayı içiyorum would mean a particular tea that both of you know.
• Annem çayı getiriyor.My mother is bringing the tea.This is a particular tea, so çay takes the accusative -ı. The ending joins straight onto the y: çayı, not çayyı.
• Çaya şeker koyuyorum.I put sugar in the tea.The dative -a marks where the sugar goes. Çay already ends in y, so no buffer is added: çaya.
• Üç çay lütfen.Three teas, please.Even for three glasses, çay stays singular after the number. Üç çaylar is wrong.
• Çayın hazır.Your tea is ready.Here -ın is the possessive your, not a genitive. The same letters can also mean of the tea, so the rest of the sentence decides.
• çaylarteasçay·lar-ler / -lar: the plural suffix
• çayımızour teaçay·ımız-imiz / -ımız / -umuz / -ümüz: our
• çaylarımızdanfrom our teasçay·lar-ler / -lar: the plural suffix·ımız-imiz / -ımız / -umuz / -ümüz: our·dan-den / -dan / -ten / -tan: from, out of
• Çaydan sonra yürüyoruz.After tea we go for a walk.The word sonra (after) asks for the ablative: çaydan sonra. The y is a voiced sound, so the ending is -dan, not -tan.

Watch out

Do not copy araba → arabaya. A word ending in a vowel needs the buffer y, but çay already ends in y, so the vowel ending joins directly: çaya, çayı, never çayya or çayyı.

Try it yourself

1. Add the dative to çay (tea): to the tea.

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   çaya

   çaya: the last vowel a is back, so the dative is -a; the y is already a consonant, so no second y appears.

2. Add the accusative to çay (tea): my mother brings the tea.

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   çayı

   çayı: the tea is a particular one, so it takes the accusative; the back vowel a gives -ı, which joins straight after y.

3. Add the possessive our to çay (tea): our tea.

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   çayımız

   çayımız: after a consonant the possessive our is -ımız, with ı because the vowel a is back; no buffer is needed.

4. Three teas, please. Do not add a plural.

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   çay

   çay: after a number the noun stays singular, because üç already counts the glasses.

Use it today

Write four short sentences about tea at home, using çayı, çaya, çaydan and çayımız, and check that no word has a double y.