Evidential past -mIş

The evidential past suffix -mIş marks a past event that the speaker did not personally witness. It is used when the information comes from hearsay (someone told you), from inference based on visible evidence (you see the result but not the event itself), or when the speaker is surprised to learn something. Turkish grammar treats these three situations as a single category and requires -mIş in all of them. Using the witnessed past -DI instead would claim first-hand knowledge the speaker does not have — a factual error in Turkish, not merely a stylistic choice.

• Hearsay. You were told about the event by someone else, or you read about it. You have no direct memory of seeing it happen.

• Inference from a result. You see evidence of something that already happened but were not there when it happened — wet roads tell you it rained, but you did not see the rain.

• Surprise or newly learned information. You have just discovered something about a present state or past event and you are reacting to it. This use is common with adjective and noun predicates (copular -(y)mIş).

For verbs, drop the infinitive marker -mek / -mak to get the verb stem, then add -mIş (vowel-harmonised: -miş / -mış / -müş / -muş), followed by the personal suffix. The vowel in -mIş follows four-way vowel harmony based on the last vowel of the stem.

For nominal and adjectival predicates (copular use), attach -(y)mIş directly to the noun or adjective, again with vowel harmony. The buffer consonant y is inserted only when the word ends in a vowel.

• Using -mIş for events you actually witnessed. If you saw something happen, use -DI. Saying Ahmet gelmiş when you watched Ahmet walk through the door implies you did not see it — which is false and confusing for the listener.

• Confusing the evidential -mIş with the -mIş perfect participle. The same suffix also forms a participle used in compound tenses and relative clauses (e.g. gelmiş adam — the man who has come). Context and sentence position distinguish the two uses; the evidential always appears as the main predicate of a sentence.

• Defaulting to -DI for hearsay or inference. Learners often reach for -DI as a general past tense. In Turkish this is not neutral — it asserts that you were there. When reporting what someone told you or what you deduced, -mIş is not optional.

• Dropping copular -(y)mIş on adjective and noun predicates. When reporting a state rather than an action, the evidential must still appear on the predicate. Hastaydı (witnessed past copula) is wrong if you only heard the person was ill; the correct form is hastaymış.