In this week’s language lesson, I’ll introduce you to the personal pronouns of Kyrgyz, how to introduce yourself to someone, and how to express “to be” (Kyrgyz does this without a verb!).  It may sound like a lot, but it’s actually not too difficult.  With a little practice, you can land in Kyrgyzstan being able to get acquainted with your hosts.

First off, the pronouns!  Kyrgyz follows a pretty standard set of pronouns that it shares with other Turkic languages.  The formal ones get a little confusing, but don’t worry too much.  By the way, there’s no gender in Kyrgyz (yay)!

Remember my lesson on plurals?  You can easily remember the second- and third-person plurals by the fact that, while they are semi-exceptions, they generally follow the same rules as regular plurals.  And, Uzbek keeps it simple as always: second person plural is just “sizlar.”

Those aren’t too hard to remember, right?  Now, let’s go over “to be” so you can tell your hosts a little bit about yourself.  Rather, let me tell you that there is no “to be” in Kyrgyz.  If you say a subject and a noun or an adjective, it’s understood that the subject “is” that noun or adjective.  We only use the specific verb when it’s in the past or the future tense.  So I’m not going to confuse you by telling it to you now.

Let’s say I’m introducing myself.  Here’s how it would go, with literal translation below.

Мен Марк.  Мен студент.  Мен Американец.  Мен бактылоо.
I Mark.  I student.  I American.  I happy.

Бул Синди.  Ал мугалим.  Ал апам.  Ал немец.
This Cindy.  She teacher.  She [my] mother.  She German.

Dead simple, right (ignore that possessive in the second one)?  Just who they are and what they are.

There’s one little complication: to be can actually also be represented by endings on standard, unchanging word stems.  In fact, just about all of Kyrgyz grammatical meaning is communicated by the endings placed on words, which is why it’s called an “agglutinative language.”  This sometimes makes it harder to deduce specific meaning, but it also makes it easier to “get the gist.”

With “to be” there is a set of endings called the personal pronoun endings.  When attached, these tell us that someone is something, allowing us to drop the subject entirely and deduce who is doing the thing.  In practice, I really only hear it with “I am,” so I’ll only teach you that one.  It’s –м>н, where > denotes a right shift vowel.  In practice:

Маркмын, студентмин, Американецмин, бактылоомун.

See the suffix and harmony in action?  Luckily most people don’t drop the subject when using this form, so it’s usually abundantly clear who someone is talking about.

Finally, you have to ask someone their name too!  I’ll skip explaining the grammar and just give you the phrase: “Атыңыз ким,” (atyngyz kim, meaning your name is who) or with the suffix, “кимсиз” (which literally means “who are you” but is used to ask about yourself).

So, now you know how to reply! Here’s a sample dialogue to practice with.

Me: Саламатсызбы!
Other person: Саламатчылык!
Me: Атыңыз ким?
Her: Менин атым Гульзада.  Сизчи? (Sizchi asks “and you?”)
Me: Мен Марк.  Мен студентмын.
Her: Очен приятна!
Me: Очен приятна!

Now the actual Kyrgyz way to say “nice to meet you” is hard to pronounce for beginners, and nobody actually ever says it, so I’m giving you the easier Russian one, which is “ochin priyatna.”

There you have it!  You can now introduce yourself to someone here and tell them a little bit about yourself!

I know these are some pretty bare bones basic lessons, but I’m excited to dive a bit deeper into grammar.  I’m trusting you to build your vocabulary on your own (maybe with the new Google Translate Kyrgyz), but I at the very least, I hope you enjoy being able to see a little bit of how languages in the Turkic family work and how they’re different from English, Germanic, Romance, and other Indo-European languages.

Got questions? Hit the comments!