Lesson 11. Tell “to our houses” from “in our houses”

Why this matters

Imagine two tickets: one takes you to a museum; the other admits you inside it. Both mention the museum, but their jobs differ. A Kazakh word can likewise keep its stem and possession while changing its final part: үйлерімізге means “to our houses”; үйлерімізде means “in our houses.”

See the whole pattern first

In lesson 10, we read үй-лер-іміз-ге as house + plural + our + direction. Here -ге marks direction; it is a dative case ending, answering “to what?”. -де marks location; it is a locative case ending, answering “where?”. A case marks a word’s relationship to other words in a sentence: direction or location here. This part follows the possession part. For our second familiar stem, we get мектеп-тер-іміз-ге and мектеп-тер-іміз-де. The order and ending variants follow the Kazakh grammar description.

Runnable step

Before the code, meet its new marks. endswith checks the word ending; removesuffix removes an ending already checked; elif means “otherwise, if,” and the variable case stores the case name. The vertical bar | separates study parts in the output; it is not written in the word.

Create case.py in UTF-8 inside ai-course. Run python3 case.py on macOS/Linux or py case.py on Windows.

known = {"үйлеріміз": "үй | лер | іміз",
         "мектептеріміз": "мектеп | тер | іміз"}
word = input("Сөз: ").lower()
if word.endswith("ге"):
    base = word.removesuffix("ге")
    case = "барыс"
elif word.endswith("де"):
    base = word.removesuffix("де")
    case = "жатыс"
else:
    base = ""
    case = ""
if base in known:
    print(known[base], "|", case)
else:
    print("білмеймін")

The ready-to-run step file has the same code. Read the explanation below before using it.

endswith("ге") asks whether the text ends with exactly these letters; the result is yes or no. removesuffix("ге") returns new text without that checked ending. We check before removing so that an unrelated ending does not become a known one. elif means “otherwise, if” and runs only if the first condition did not match. else handles the remaining cases. The empty string "" means no recognized part was found. base and case are variable names; case is not a special Python command. The commas inside print place spaces between output parts. | is a visible boundary for study, not part of the Kazakh word.

We confirm only two “our …” bases and two final parts. The program does not validate all Kazakh forms. It does not accept үйімізге, мектептерімізге? with punctuation, or other endings. A refusal marks the table’s limit; it does not say the word is wrong.

Memory map

Entered word → check final ге/де → remove it → look up the rest → name direction/location or say білмеймін.

Recall and task

Hide the code. Using the map, explain why we cannot accept every word ending in ге. Then run үйлерімізге, мектептерімізде, үйімізге, and үйлерімізді separately.

Task: predict the outputs for МЕКТЕПТЕРІМІЗГЕ and үйлерімізде before running. Hint: lower() changes the case; the text left after removing the ending must occur in known. Answer: мектеп | тер | іміз | барыс and үй | лер | іміз | жатыс. үйімізге and үйлерімізді produce білмеймін. Common mistake: cutting off the last two letters without checking them is like tearing a ticket before reading its destination.