a newspaper obituary column: Bayramlaşamadıklarımız (Bayram [festival]-Recipr-Impot-Partic-Plur-PossPl1; "Those of our number with whom we cannot exchange the season's greetings"). Another example can be seen in the final word of this heading of the online Turkish Spelling Guide (İmlâ Kılavuzu): Dilde birlik, ulusal birliğin vazgeçilemezlerindendir ("Unity in language is among the indispensables [dispense-Pass-Impot-Plur-PossS3-Abl-Copula] of national unity ~ Linguistic unity is a sine qua non of national unity"). Nouns Gender Turkish does not have grammatical gender and the sex of persons do not affect the forms of words. The third-person pronoun may refer to "he," "she" or "it." Despite this lack, Turkish still has ways of indicating gender in nouns: Most domestic animals have male and female forms, e.g., (stallion), (mare), (bull), (cow). For other animals, the sex may be indicated by adding the word (female) before the corresponding noun, e.g., (female cat). For people, the female sex may be indicated by adding the word (girl) or (woman), e.g., (heroine) instead of (hero). Some foreign words of French or Arabic origin already have separate female forms, e.g., (actress). The Serbo-Croat feminine suffix –ica is used in three borrowings: (queen), (empress) and (tsarina). This suffix was used in the neologism (< Old Turkic "god"). Case There is no definite article in Turkish, but definiteness of the object is implied when the accusative ending is used (see below). Turkish nouns decline by taking case endings. There are six noun cases in Turkish, with all the endings following vowel harmony (shown in the table using the shorthand superscript notation). Since the postposition ile often gets suffixed onto the noun, some analyze it as an instrumental case, although it takes the genitive with personal pronouns, singular demonstratives, and interrogative kim. The plural marker -ler ² immediately follows the noun before any case or other affixes (e.g. köylerin "of the villages"). The accusative case marker is used only for definite objects; compare (bir) ağaç gördük "we saw a tree" with ağacı gördük "we saw the tree". The plural marker -ler ² is generally not used when a class or category is meant: ağaç gördük can equally well mean "we saw trees [as we walked through the forest]"—as opposed to ağaçları gördük "we saw the trees [in question]". The declension of ağaç illustrates two important features of Turkish phonology: consonant assimilation in suffixes (ağaçtan, ağaçta) and voicing of final consonants before vowels (ağacın, ağaca, ağacı). Additionally, nouns can