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Example
Turkish case and verb morphology (Odadan hızlı çıktım)
Turkish “I left the room quickly”: ablative -dan, comitative -lı, and a first-person past suffix, aligned to English word by word.
Example layout based on an example in the Wikipedia article Interlinear gloss (illustrative; Leipzig-style conventions).
What this example shows
Turkish builds a whole clause by gluing suffixes onto a few stems. The sentence Odadan hızlı çıktım means “I left the room quickly”, and every grammatical detail rides on a suffix rather than a separate word. Lined up against English, the alignment shows where one language uses a suffix and the other a full word.
The sentence, token by token
Three Turkish words carry what English spreads across five. Each token with its gloss:
- Oda-dan room-ABL
- The ablative suffix -dan means “from”, so “from the room”. English folds that into the verb “left”.
- hız-lı speed-COM
- The suffix -lı turns “speed” into “with speed”, which English renders as the adverb “quickly”.
- çık-tı-m exit-PFV-1SG
- One token holds the verb stem, the completed-action aspect, and the first-person subject. English needs two words, “I left”.
Why the connectors cross
English puts the subject and verb first: “I left the room quickly.” Turkish keeps the verb last and packs case and person into suffixes. The link from oda-dan runs to “room” in the middle of the English line, while the link from çık-tı-m runs back to “I left” at the start, so the two connectors cross. In flat text that reordering is easy to miss; the diagram makes it visible at a glance.
Agglutination in one clause
Turkish is agglutinative: one suffix carries one meaning, and the suffixes stack in a fixed order. çık-tı-m reads as stem, then aspect, then person, left to right. English splits the same information into separate words and word order. A single Turkish column of stacked suffixes faces three English positions.
Glossing conventions used here
Each suffix gets its own hyphen-aligned gloss, so the source line and the gloss line carry the same number of hyphens. The labels ABL, COM, PFV, and 1SG are standard Leipzig tags for ablative case, comitative, perfective aspect, and first-person singular.
For the full set of these labels:
Recreate it in the editor
Open the example in the editor, then add an IPA line above the Turkish or a free-translation line below. To keep a suffix attached while you experiment, set the morpheme boundary character under Settings → Tokens. Export the finished diagram as PNG, SVG, or PDF for a handout or slide.
See also
Related phenomena in other examples:
- Turkish infinitive gloss shows one token glossed as two English words with a period.
- Lezgian morpheme gloss shows case stacking and the rule that hyphen counts must match.
- Russian case and gender agreement shows instrumental and accusative with a gendered past tense.
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