Now I'm going to talk about how to express the meaning "before" in Turkish
"Önce" is a Turkish post position, in other words
just like a preposition except that it comes after the word that it's referring to
"Önce" is a post position meaning either before or ago. After a Turkish noun in the nominative case
so for example the noun "yıllar"
meaning "years"
"Yıllar" is in the nominative, if we have "önce"
Yıllar önce
that means years ago
But following a noun in the ablative case "önce" carries the meaning of "before"
For example if the Turkish word for school is "okul"
if we want to say "before school"
we'll put "okul" in the ablative case and then add our post position "önce" so
Okuldan önce
Before school
Another example. Let's say we want to say "before Sunday"
Pazar gününden
So, "Sunday" ablative ending
önce
before
Sunday
Another example we can do it with times, so let's say we want to say,
Before seven-thirty
Saat yedi buçuk...
Ok, seven-thirty. Ablative ending.
Saat yedi buçuktan önce
Before seven-thirty. We can use "önce" as a post position with pronouns
Personal pronouns and the pronouns meaning "this and that."
Let's look with a personal pronoun, "sen"
You singular informal
Senden önce
before you
Another example you can use of "önce" with question words like
kim: who
Or
ne: what
If you want to say "before what?"
you can say "ne": what
-den
önce
So we've seen how we can use the post position "önce" to mean before
following nouns in the ablative case
We can actually also use
"önce" as a post position with verbs to create the meaning before, like, before reading before going to bed
Let's look at what we'll do. We'll start with a verb stem and add
the appropriate form of this ending according to the rules of two-way vowel harmony
The ending is
-meden
or
-madan
Depending on the rules of two-way vowel harmony.
So
for example let's say we want to say before going
We'll say
git
the verb stem of the Turkish word for "gitmek": to go
gitmeden önce
before going
And this could be depending on the context and the sentence in which we find this this could mean
Before I went, before you went
but here in isolation before going.
Another example
with the Turkish verb okumak: to read
oku- our verb stem plus the appropriate form of this suffix. So.
okumadan önce
This is a separate word.
Before reading
And that's how you express the idea of before in Turkish.