How does Turkish handle addressing something like ‘the police’ in sentence structure? (without using anything similar to ‘the’)
e.g. ‘The police force has expanded recently in this city.’
e.g. ‘The police force has expanded recently in this city.’
e.g. to save on space, paper, writing effort, etc…, Turkish writers have to rely on the reader reading in-between the lines to a greater extent than a similar English writer would in a similar position.
And after many generations of writers competing, it simply became the default norm.
Most likely it is multi variate in the end; as it is quite a broad thing.
If I'm talking about a specific police officer, then I'd use "o", which means he/she/it/that.
O geldi -> he/she/it/that arrived.
O polis geldi -> that police arrived.
Ona polis geldi -> police arrived to him/her (his/her place).
polis geldi -> the police (has) arrived.
O bahsettiğin polis geldi -> The police officer you were talking about (has) arrived.
On the other hand, I think I may also be failing to explain this correctly because we are already at the limits of my English :)
If you can just write one example in Turkish, of each case, so three total, most readers can probably puzzle it out with enough time using translation tools.
> Polis, toplumun güvenliğini sağlamakla görevlidir.
> (Police are responsible for maintaining public safety.)
Police Force as an Organizational Unit:
> Bu şehirdeki polis teşkilatı faaliyetlerini arttırdı.
> (The police force in this city has expanded its operations.)
Specific Police Force Within a Specific City:
> İstanbul polisi son zamanlarda çok aktif.
> (The Istanbul police have been very active lately.)
Interestingly the -ki suffix here was borrowed from Persian (another Indo-European language like English), and effectively highlights a unique instance - "the one which" - in a way that Turkish otherwise doesn't specifically do.
Sources: Me being a native speaker and also: Turkish Grammar (Oxford 2nd ed. 2001), Geoffrey Lewis. Pages 69 and 211 (Just checked to be sure).
You don't need most of the time because it's evident from the context without any ambiguity.
You also need to know what English is quite lacking in the declension and inflection departments which do the heavy lifting in the other languages and often eliminate the need for a separate article words.