"With" and "Without": The Adjectival Suffixes -lı / -siz

Turkish has a pair of suffixes that do the job English hands to “with” and “without,” or to the endings -ful and -less: glue one onto a noun and you get an adjective meaning “having that thing,” glue the other on and you get its exact opposite, “lacking it.” Once you know the pair, you can build adjectives on the fly from almost any noun you already know.

What these suffixes do

-lı (and its vowel-harmony variants) turns a noun into an adjective meaning “having [noun] / with [noun].” -sız (and its variants) is its mirror image, meaning “without [noun] / lacking [noun]”:

• tuz (salt) → tuzlu (salty, with salt) / tuzsuz (saltless, without salt)
• şeker (sugar) → şekerli (sweetened, with sugar) / şekersiz (unsweetened, without sugar)
• para (money) → paralı (paid, costing money) / parasız (free, costing nothing)

Both suffixes attach directly to a noun and hand you a ready-made adjective — no separate word for “with” or “without” is needed at all.

Forming it

Both suffixes have the same four-way vowel-harmony pattern, chosen by the last vowel of the noun they attach to:

For example: tuz (last vowel u) gives tuzlu and tuzsuz; şeker (last vowel e) gives şekerli and şekersiz.

Because both suffixes start with a consonant (l or s), unlike the case endings you’ve already learned — the dative -e/-a, the genitive -in/-ın/-un/-ün, the instrumental -(y)le/-(y)la — they never need a buffer sound, even when the noun ends in a vowel:

• su (water) → sulu (watery, with water) — no buffer -y- inserted
• para (money) → paralı (paid) — no buffer inserted

They attach exactly the same way whether the noun ends in a vowel or a consonant, which makes them simpler to apply than most of the suffixes you’ve met so far.

Exceptions worth knowing

The meaning sometimes drifts away from the literal “having/lacking.” Most pairs stay perfectly transparent — şanslı (“lucky,” from şans, luck) and şanssız (“unlucky”) mean exactly what you’d expect. But a few common words have drifted idiomatically, and the two sides of a pair don’t always drift the same way: evli (“married,” built regularly from ev, house) no longer means “having a house” in everyday speech, while its opposite evsiz (“homeless”) kept the plain, literal sense of “without a house.” Learn these high-frequency idiomatic forms as vocabulary in their own right rather than puzzling out the literal meaning each time.

Attached to a place name, -lı means “from that place” / “a native of that place” rather than “having” it: Ankara → Ankaralı (a person from Ankara), İzmir → İzmirli (a person from Izmir), İstanbul → İstanbullu (a person from Istanbul) — note the doubled l in İstanbullu, which is just the regular suffix -lu landing on a stem that already ends in l, not a special rule.

Don’t confuse this with the separate suffix -lık/-lik/-luk/-lük, which looks similar but builds abstract nouns or “intended for X” adjectives instead — çocuk (child) → çocukluk (childhood), not an adjective meaning “having a child.” That’s a different suffix for a different lesson; -lı/-sız only ever means “having/lacking,” never “the state of” or “meant for.”

Examples

• Bu kahve çok şekerli. — This coffee has a lot of sugar in it.
• Ben her sabah şekersiz kahve içerim. — I drink coffee without sugar every morning.
• Sen gerçekten çok şanslı bir insansın. — You are really a very lucky person.
• O, akıllı ve sakin bir öğretmen. — He/she is a smart and calm teacher.
• Biz parasız bir tatil planladık. — We planned a free (no-cost) vacation.
• Onlar tuzsuz yemek yiyorlar çünkü doktorları öyle istedi. — They’re eating saltless food because their doctor asked them to.
• Sen Ankaralı mısın, yoksa İstanbullu musun? — Are you from Ankara, or are you from Istanbul?

Try it yourself

Babi, Speafy’s AI tutor, will have you build adjectives on the spot from nouns you already know — swapping -lı for -sız on the same noun until the opposite-pair pattern feels automatic — and Speafy’s FSRS-based flashcards make sure the idiomatic drifters like evli get reviewed often enough that you never have to stop and puzzle them out again.