Amerika dizginlenemeden
dünyanın selameti yok
dünyanın selameti yok
That is a headline from Birgün, p. 13, March 4 (Sunday), 2007. Various translations are possible, such as:
- If America cannot be reined in, the world has no peace.
- Without America's being able to be reined in, the world's peace does not exist.
While having sympathy for the headline, I note it here mainly for a grammatical feature that I have not seen documented:
The noun dizgin means rein
; this forms the verb
dizginle- rein in,
whose passive form is
dizginlen- be reined in.
A verb can take a (harmonizing) suffix -meden
without —ing
; hence dizginlenmeden
without being reined in.
The Turkish Grammar of Geoffrey Lewis (2nd ed., Oxford, 2000) notes (at XI, 12, p. 182) that this suffix -meden is not a combination of the verbal-noun suffix -me and the ablative ending -den. A footnote suggests that the -me in -meden is originally the negative suffix.
Lewis does not record the possibility of using the
impotential suffix -eme in place of -me to form the
compound suffix -emeden without being able to
—.
(Nor have I found the possibility noted in
Turkish books of Turkish grammar.) But this possibility seems
to have been actualized in the headline above.