# -ce prefix



## mayasham

Help!  Can someone please tell me what the -ca/ce/ça/çe suffix means in Turkish?!  As in "güzel*ce* bir kýz" or "uzun*ca* bir süredir tatil".  I'm trying to catch up on a class I missed, but we use the Tomer book and it's absolutely impossible to follow without a teacher.  It tells you how to decline -ce, but not what it means!  Thanks


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## Asr

the suffix -ce there diminishes the value of the adjective. So güzelce; she is beautiful, but not that beautiful; uzunca; kinda long, but not that long.


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## vatrahos

What about -cE with numbers? I'm thinking of this phrase:

"milyonlarca insan"

Does it here mean "millions of people"? 

Is the "-cE" used here because it's describing people (like şarkı ---> şarkıcı, yol ---> yolcu ) or is there some other reason we put "-cE" on the end of numbers?


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## Asr

vatrahos said:


> What about -cE with numbers? I'm thinking of this phrase:
> 
> "milyonlarca insan"
> 
> Does it here mean "millions of people"?


 
exactly! the -ce has to be there when the number is in plural form. So _two hundred books_ would translate as _iki yüz kitap_, but the hundreds of books would be _yüzlerce kitap_.


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## Evros

I don't know how to describe,but we may say it has some kind of meaning a similarity,or being alike.
güzelce bir kız -a beautiful like girl (something around the definition beautiful) 
uzunca bir yol - a longlike way (soemthing like long) 
milyonlarca insan - (like,around milion) people

Besides,it is used for languages  as you may know :
english=ingilizce
turkish=türkçe
hungarian=macarca


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## lepanto

it would be better if we say ce-çe prefix. there is also a different sort of ce like "amicable/friendly reproach" means arkadaşça yaklaşım or childish behaviour means çocukça davranış


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## CapnPrep

I think it would be better not to say "prefix"… 

According to Lewis's grammar, -CE has "largely superseded *tarafından*" as an indicator of the agent of a passive verb. Do you agree with this? I still come across many examples of _tarafından_, but maybe it has been replaced by -CE in conversational speech?


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## Rallino

Yup, for example the following sentence sounds super correct to me:

_"_Nükleer enerjinin kullanımı bilim adamların*ca* destek gören bir projedir._"_

adamların*ca* vs. adamları *tarafından* . They are interchangeable here.


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