[HN Gopher] Turkish language has a gossip tense
___________________________________________________________________
Turkish language has a gossip tense
Author : sedatk
Score : 120 points
Date : 2024-10-09 22:34 UTC (3 days ago)
(HTM) web link (twitter.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (twitter.com)
| brudgers wrote:
| So does English, https://www.ef.edu/english-resources/english-
| grammar/tense-c...
| namaria wrote:
| Not the same thing. Reporting speech by saying 'subject said
| (...) [past tense verb] (...)' is not specific to English and
| doesn't carry the same nuance as the tweet implies this Turkish
| 'gossip' tense carries.
| brudgers wrote:
| Different languages convey nuance with different mechanics.
| The only reason an English speaker would say "He said he
| would be at the airport" is to convey nuance.
|
| + _He_ said he would be at the airport
|
| + He _said_ he would be at the airport
|
| + He said he _would be_ at the airport
|
| + He said he would be at the _airport_
| namaria wrote:
| Fair enough, but the interesting tidbit is that in Turkish
| you can add a verb ending that implies reportedness and
| that's interesting in itself and not present in English.
| brudgers wrote:
| Verb tense is distinct from conjugation (and semantics
| are a whole different matter altogether). Careful
| consideration doesnt make trending tweets.
| sedatk wrote:
| Also, it's not optional. Unless you use "gossip tense" or
| explicitly state that it's hearsay, it must be factual.
| There's no ambiguity unlike English.
| exac wrote:
| No, you are misunderstanding if you think that is a "gossip
| tense".
| farmeroy wrote:
| Turkish is one of my favorite languages I've learned, and one of
| the best languages for a language learner. I think it's great for
| learners for two reasons: first of all, the grammar and
| orthography is extremely regular, and probably more importantly
| is that in my experience turkish speaking people are more than
| happy to engage is extended small talk about anything, are
| extremely eager to understand you despite your horrible turkish,
| and are almost always impressed by any level of effort. This is
| in terrible contrast to french or german, where not only does the
| grammar or spelling horrify, but people are almost unwilling to
| understand your pitiful efforts :(
| rich_sasha wrote:
| I feel your pain!
|
| I'm considering learning either Turkish or Arabic, for fun (as
| phonetically-spelled non-Indoeuropean languages), do you have a
| comparison with Arabic? I know exactly what you mean re French
| and German...
| farmeroy wrote:
| I don't know any Arabic unfortunately. They are completely
| different language families with only slight overlap in
| vocabulary, but beyond that I can't make a comparison. I
| would say it probably depends on what your language learning
| goals are, but turkish is super fun to learn and speak, and
| its super fun to travel in turkey or just to hang out in
| istanbul. You might also surprise yourself speaking turkish
| in China one day with some Xinjiang people as well :D
| geoka9 wrote:
| To add, knowledge of Turkish will also make it easier to
| converse in Azerbaijan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan and a
| bunch of other countries in the region.
| davidzweig wrote:
| Also many Iranians speak 'Turk' and understand Turkish
| from watching Turkish telenovelas on satellite TV.
| geoka9 wrote:
| Good point! Although, what they call 'Turk' is actually
| Azeri :) (Part of the historical Azerbaijan is in Iran.)
| rich_sasha wrote:
| How very interesting, I understand Turkish and Farsi are
| totally unrelated (Turkic and Indo-European language
| families).
| rvense wrote:
| More than half of the Iranian population belong to an
| ethnic minority, and the biggest by far is the Turkish
| speaking one, the Azeri - it's something like 1/3 of the
| population as far as I remember. I don't know if non-
| Azeri learn Turkish from TV, but for a lot of Iranians
| it's simply their first language.
| fakedang wrote:
| To add to that, I learnt to basic-speak the now extinct
| language of Chagatai, because I know Turkish.
|
| Turkish is also mutually intelligible with Uzbek and
| Kazakh - it's basically like English and Dutch.
|
| Edit:- Learning Chagatai practically let's you speak
| Kazakh and Uzbek partway. Tried it in both countries,
| might work in other places like Kyrgyzstan and
| Turkmenistan too. :)
| adrian_b wrote:
| For the speakers of European languages it is usually quite
| difficult to learn to pronounce correctly some of the sounds
| of Arabic. Turkish does not have any sounds hard to pronounce
| for Europeans.
|
| The Indo-European languages and the Afro-Asiatic, including
| the Semitic languages like Arabic, are distinguished from
| most languages of the world by having much more irregular
| grammars, of the kind that was traditionally named
| "inflected".
|
| Amazingly, while the more irregular grammars of the
| "inflected" languages are better seen as a bug and not as a
| feature, in the past the European scholars believed that such
| grammars are a sign of superiority of the Indo-European and
| Semitic languages, even if it is much easier to argue in
| favor of an opposite point of view.
|
| In conclusion, I believe that for a speaker of European
| languages it is much easier to learn Turkish, due to easier
| pronunciation and more regular grammar.
|
| Nevertheless, when there is no special reason for learning
| either of the languages, Modern Standard Arabic or Classical
| Arabic are more interesting languages from a historical point
| of view, enabling the understanding of many facts about the
| old Arabic literature or pertaining to the related Semitic
| languages that have been very important in the Ancient World
| or about the origins of the Greek and Latin alphabets
| (Standard Arabic has a conservative phonology and it still
| distinguishes most of the sounds for which the oldest Semitic
| alphabet has been created, which has later evolved into the
| simplified Phoenician alphabet, from which the Greek, Aramaic
| and Hebrew alphabets have been derived).
| farmeroy wrote:
| It would probably be fun to read some original mathematical
| texts in arabic if you could. I would say that since modern
| turkish didn't come into being until the founding of the
| republic, you really do lose the historical context. I
| would love to learn ottoman turkish one day...
| andro_dev wrote:
| Actually there is no such thing as Ottoman Turkish, it is
| still Turkish with heavily borrowed phrases. It is not a
| distinct language. You won't have any hard time
| understanding the spoken Turkish in Anatolia of that
| time. So called Ottoman Turkish was mostly limited to the
| government and literature use. Here is a recording of
| "Ottoman Turkish" from that time.
|
| https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=fmNl4gcufBU&pp=ygU0RXNraSBr
| YXl...
| farmeroy wrote:
| I'm too out of practice to really engage at this level.
| But actually, I meant I would like to learn the Ottoman
| Turkish of government and literature. I obviously can't
| go back in time and converse with the Anatolian turks and
| if I could, I might prefer to also have some Greek and
| Armenian in my toolbox...
| blacksmith_tb wrote:
| I took three years of Arabic as an undergrad, it's an
| interesting language to study, but needing to learn the
| alphabet will make it more difficult than Turkish, I would
| say. Which might be fine if you're looking for a challenge!
| readthenotes1 wrote:
| "This is in terrible contrast to french "
|
| I guess I got lucky in France then because they felt so sorry
| for me after my attempts at french they would reply in english
| jcul wrote:
| That's kind of the problem though, if you are trying to learn
| and people just switch to English it's difficult to make
| progress.
|
| I've had situations in France where I ended up having one
| side of the conversation in French and one in English!
| vidarh wrote:
| Getting out of the big cities tends to help. Or even just
| out of the tourist area. The last time I went to Nice, for
| example, I found it hilarious that within Carre d'Or,
| people would switch to English when I showed the slightest
| hesitation with my French, or the first time I made an
| error (so, quickly). But just a few steps into Liberation,
| minutes walk away, we kept coming across shop staff that
| kept speaking French no matter what horrible crimes I
| committed against their language...
| dhruvrajvanshi wrote:
| It's a tricky situation as a language learner. On the one
| hand, you've got to be polite, trying to converse with
| people in their native language, on the other, you don't
| want to waste their time just for your own language
| learning goals.
|
| I live in Germany and I always start conversations in
| German, but if it becomes clear that their English is much
| better than my German, I switch to English to spare them of
| the burden. It's not the barista's job to indulge me in my
| learning pursuits :)
| 082349872349872 wrote:
| > _one side of the conversation in French and one in
| English!_
|
| This is actually an effective way for two people to
| practise each others' language, and is adjustable according
| to aptitudes:
|
| Easy mode: each person speaks their own L1
|
| Hard mode: each person speaks the other's L1
| pjmlp wrote:
| As someone that has lived in French and German speaking
| countries and nowadays speaks both fluently, I would assert
| usually in French speaking countries there is the cultural
| issue of speaking directly in English versus trying a very
| basic "Parlez vous Anglais?" as initial question.
|
| Whereas in German speaking countries I only had any issues in
| reaching out to technicians for house repairs.
|
| However if we insist learning French and German, regardless how
| bad it might feel like during initial efforts, eventually it
| will improve good enough to work on those languages.
| petesergeant wrote:
| > there is the cultural issue of speaking directly in English
| versus trying a very basic "Parlez vous Anglais?" as initial
| question
|
| In my experience in the Netherlands you should definitely
| just start speaking English to people, as asking someone if
| they speak English is a bit like asking if they can read
| pjmlp wrote:
| As mentioned, it is a cultural thing.
| Scarblac wrote:
| Yes, we much prefer speaking English over having to endure
| slow, broken Dutch.
| WJW wrote:
| Yes we do, but there's a bit of nuance to it. Most Dutch
| people will happily oblige to speak slowly (within
| reason) if you preface any conversation with a quick "I'm
| trying to learn Dutch properly", and will appreciate the
| effort.
|
| Knowing the language will definitely help people fit in
| better as many conversations amongst the Dutch will still
| be in Dutch and also most signage and other written texts
| will obviously also be in Dutch.
| vidarh wrote:
| Yeah, the difference in France if you try vs. don't try can
| be dramatic. My first school trip to France with my French
| class, one of the girls in my class tried asking for
| something in a small shop in Paris in English. The entire
| shop went quiet, until she tried again in French whereon they
| immediately spoke English to her.
|
| Conversely, I went into a small shop, tried my broken French,
| and asked the shopkeeper if he spoke English after a failed
| attempt at making him understand me. He didn't, but dragged
| me into the street and started stopping random people until
| he found someone who could help translate.
|
| While purely anecdotal, those extremes seem fairly common
| even today, and frankly I get it - it'd annoy me to if people
| don't even make a perfunctory attempt. Of course the
| stereotype of certain types of tourists doesn't help.
|
| Apart from that, I think people in general are far more
| likely to feel ok about trying to express themselves in your
| language if you've made a fool of yourself in their language
| first...
| makmanalp wrote:
| The thing about Turkish is that the grammar is very forgiving
| to mistakes while preserving meaning: word order can be
| leveraged for subtle emphasis but pretty much doesn't matter
| for general meaning. Conjugations are pretty much always
| standard. There is a "correct" ordering for the suffixes but
| the meaning is generally obvious even without them. If you mess
| up the vowel harmony it just sounds odd but again the meaning
| is clear. You can often omit articles because the suffixes
| mirror them. It's also a phonetic language - there's no "sounds
| different at the end of the word" etc.
|
| It's really the perfect language to pick up on a visit even ...
| except the vocabulary doesn't resemble anything that most of
| the rest of the world speaks. There's lots of loanwords from
| farsi, arabic, french and english of course but beyond that and
| speakers of other Turkic languages, it's struggle for most
| people.
|
| But yes, it's true that we're often over the moon that someone
| put in the effort to speak it :-)
| psychoslave wrote:
| Desole, nous avons nous meme ete eleve dans une demarche visant
| a systematiquement developper un sentiment de culpabilite pour
| chaque ecart a la sacrocainte norme langagiere promu par une
| bande de reactionnaires sans competences linguistiques qui se
| prennent pour les defenseurs de la langue dont ils fommentent
| la sclerose.
| k__ wrote:
| As a German speaker, I understand those issues.
|
| I currently learn Spanish, and I'm always amused by how regular
| everything is.
|
| In German, words constantly get split up and change positions
| in the sentences when you say something slightly different.
|
| Du sprichst Deutsch.
|
| Sprichst du Deutsch?
|
| Vs
|
| Hablas Espanol.
|
| ?Hablas Espanol?
|
| Also, most Germans don't like speaking German with people who
| don't speak it well. Probably, because subtle errors can change
| the whole meaning.
|
| For most Germans it's easier to speak English with foreigners
| who speak better English than German.
| farmeroy wrote:
| Yeah it took me until B2 or so before I could get any Germans
| to really engage with me in German. My son grew up there and
| his German was quite good while we lived there, and even when
| I reached C1 he was perpetually ashamed of my accent and all
| of my grammatical errors. Of course, now that it's been some
| time since we've lived there my German has only gotten worse
| and he suffers even more when I try to practice
| seszett wrote:
| And in French...
|
| Tu parles francais
|
| Tu parles francais ?
|
| Parles-tu francais ?
|
| Est-ce-que tu parles francais ?
|
| I guess it's the best of both worlds.
|
| The French like to hear foreigners speak French though,
| they're just terrible at understanding accents they don't
| hear often and terrible at adjusting their speech so the
| other person understands them. And too self conscious about
| their English accent to speak English.
| k__ wrote:
| I only heard bad things about the French and their
| language, but I never met a unfriendly french person.
|
| Don't know where this prejudice comes from.
| judicious wrote:
| Something like this occurs cross-linguistically:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evidentiality
|
| Turkish has some evidentiality.
| politelemon wrote:
| This reddit thread casts better light on it.
|
| https://www.reddit.com/r/turkish/comments/1dgkxme/does_turki...
| idlewords wrote:
| This is not a tense but a grammatical mood, it's called the
| inferential mood. A bunch of languages have it to distinguish
| eyewitness accounts from reported speech.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inferential_mood
|
| Verb tense has to do with an action's relationship to time, mood
| expresses the speaker's relationship and attitude to the action.
| English is pretty low on moods (indicative, imperative,
| subjunctive), while other languages have a more fun arsenal.
| 082349872349872 wrote:
| Turkish also has an imprecative mood, specifically for wishing
| ill on third parties:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imprecative_mood
|
| On the other hand, a mood for well-wishing occurs in Sanskrit:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benedictive [EDIT: and Quenya?
| https://eldamo.org/content/words/word-1905928135.html ]
|
| On the gripping hand, AAVE actually has a richer tense-aspect-
| mood inventory than Standard American English:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/African-American_Vernacular_En...
|
| [now I wonder what language Galadriel's ring speech was
| supposed to have been in, and whether it had a commissive
| mood?]
| shawndrost wrote:
| > Imprecative retorts in English
|
| > While not a mood in English, expressions like _like hell it
| is_ or _the fuck you are_ are imprecative retorts. These
| consist of an expletive + a personal pronoun subject + an
| auxiliary verb.
| Sharlin wrote:
| There's a similar quasi-mood in colloquial Finnish,
| humorously called "aggressive":
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aggressive_mood
| appplication wrote:
| This was a fun and informative comment, thank you for
| sharing.
| sedatk wrote:
| It is a tense. It's literally taught as "learned past tense" in
| Turkish schools. It's similar to present perfect tense of
| English.
| yongjik wrote:
| In English, school-taught grammar is often wildly different
| from modern linguists' view. For example, while traditional
| English grammar has no less than 12 tenses, linguists
| consider it to only have two tenses: past or present. The
| remaining differences don't really behave like tense.
|
| I could imagine something similar happening in Turkish.
| sedatk wrote:
| Let me put it this way: it's not less of a tense than
| present perfect tense in English. They signify the time in
| a similar way.
| hashmush wrote:
| Right, because "present" is the tense here and "perfect"
| the aspect.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Present_perfect
| sedatk wrote:
| Ok, how is that different than "learned"/"reported" being
| the aspect and "past" being the tense in Turkish?
| amaccuish wrote:
| As the other commenter said, perfect is the aspect, so
| the internal structure of an event, very important e.g.
| in Slavic languages. Your confusion leaves the door open
| to doubt on your actual knowledge of linguistics.
| rvense wrote:
| What qualifies as a tense or not depends on your definitions
| of the term. Different linguists and traditions will have
| different standards and what is taught in school is often not
| the terminology used in scientific description - it's
| actually very common for school teachers to teach things that
| any linguist would think was downright wrong. But terminology
| is a choice, not something where it really makes sense to say
| "is" or "is not", the question is how clear does your
| description end up. (And as always, when you argue about
| whether or not something is an X, you're not so much talking
| about the thing as you're talking about the definition of the
| category X.)
|
| I studied Middle Eastern languages (though mostly Arabic and
| Persian) and linguistics at a university in northern Europe,
| and we would treat tense, aspect, and mood as different
| categories. Often they are distinct and verbs are conjugated
| both for time and e.g. evidentiality and thus it is fruitful
| to have two categories. I think this is the case for Turkish,
| e.g. see how Wikipedia lists the conjugations[0] here as a
| two-dimensional system. The article uses the term tense
| (explicitly 'for simplicity'), but I think it makes sense to
| have different names for the different categories - so tense
| would refer to the rows in that schema, and mood would refer
| to the columns.
|
| [0]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turkish_language#Verb_tenses
| sedatk wrote:
| Sure, I don't disagree that it has multi-dimensionality in
| terms of semantics. But, it signifies time. When you use
| "gossip tense" on a verb by itself, it always signifies
| that something happened in the past, there is no ambiguity
| about it. How is that this kind of unmistakable
| representation of time escapes from being a tense is a
| mystery to me. I'd love to be corrected if I'm missing
| anything.
| amaccuish wrote:
| What "Turkish schools" call it is irrelevant, it adds
| "colour" to an event. Just because the events happen to be in
| the past, does not make the Inferential Mood a tense. An
| event can be in the past but factual.
| keybored wrote:
| Apparently a lot of Buddhist texts start (in English) with "So
| it has been told to me".
| contingencies wrote:
| IIRC in Buddhism not lying is emphasised as one aspect of
| 'right speech', other requirements being those such as non-
| divisiveness, etc. https://www.accesstoinsight.org/ptf/dhamma
| /sacca/sacca4/samm... There is also a record of Buddha
| discussing the value of ideas based upon personal experience
| rather than blindly accepting them from others.
| https://www.dhammatalks.org/suttas/AN/AN3_66.html
|
| Modern Chinese uses "tingshuo" Ting Shuo (Ting Shuo )
| https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E8%81%BD%E8%AA%AA
|
| Internet uses IIRC? ;)
| mtalantikite wrote:
| Or also: "Thus have I heard".
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thus_have_I_heard
| therein wrote:
| It does indeed. And the author of this post is the founder of
| EksiSozluk. Hi Sedat. :)
|
| Because of this tense, I often find myself prefixing my sentences
| with "as far as I have heard".
| jayd16 wrote:
| What tense do they use in news or something you're fairly certain
| is fact but you didn't witness it yourself?
| teractiveodular wrote:
| Wikipedia states that they use the "normal" (not
| inferential/gossip) mood, because otherwise it could be taken
| as a value judgement in some contexts.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inferential_mood
| oguzcana wrote:
| You still use this tense if you are just reporting what you
| heard on news. What matters is that you have not witnessed it,
| just talking about what you heard on news. "There was an
| accident." "Kaza ol _mus_ " (the alleged gossip tense).
|
| If you want to emphasize something matter of factly, you might
| use the normal past tense (kaza ol _du_ ) but that might imply
| you seen it yourself, you you might get asked if you were
| actually there.
|
| In something like a history book, past events usually mentioned
| by a combination of this reported speech and past tense of the
| "do" verb: "Kaza ol _mustur_ "
|
| To sum up, it is not specifically a gossip tense. If you were
| not there, even if you are certain, you use reported version.
| darkhorn wrote:
| In the news they use "known past tense", like "gel-di". The
| article above mentiones "learned past tense", like "gel-mis".
| fph wrote:
| Isn't this also how the subjunctive is used in German? News
| reports usually are in Konjuntiv I as a form of indirect speech.
| kleton wrote:
| https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/-mi%C5%9F#Turkish
| madcaptenor wrote:
| So is this HN post gossip about the gossip tense?
| un1970ix wrote:
| I learned French because I moved to another country, and I was
| learning verb conjugations by regularly looking at the (very
| long) conjugation table. One day I just randomly looked at the
| table of verb conjugations in my mother tongue, Turkish, and I
| couldn't believe it, it's many times longer than the one in
| French! The fact that there are so many things I use in daily
| life without much effort has shown me how wonderfully the brain
| works.
| BiteCode_dev wrote:
| Note that French does have a tense for gossip.
|
| You can say: julie aurait couche avec pierre hier, meaning
| julie allegedly selpt with pierre yesterday.
|
| But it's not a cultural thing to use it outside of tv or books.
| psychoslave wrote:
| Il parait que quelqu'un voudrait faire croire que ce genre de
| phrase n'est employe que dans des oeuvres litteraires et
| televisuelles. :)
| cryptonector wrote:
| Ce quoi on dirait n'est pas vrai du tout.
| jfengel wrote:
| French learner here: I read that as "Julie would have slept
| with Pierre yesterday." I take it there's some mood subtlety
| I'm missing?
| un1970ix wrote:
| What you say is grammatically correct. But if you want to
| find out whether it implies gossip or past conditional, you
| need to look at the context.
| cryptonector wrote:
| Context. Or even the lack thereof. In this case the use of
| the conditional implies an unstated condition, the "if I'm
| right about it" condition.
|
| This is more idiomatic than grammatical. It's the same in
| Spanish. In English we don't have this sort of idiom, so
| that phrase doesn't translate very well.
| Scarblac wrote:
| Now that you say this, the exact same thing is used in Dutch
| to indicate something is a rumour.
|
| Ze zouden met elkaar naar bed zijn geweest.
| joshdavham wrote:
| Yeah! Turkish is a very agglutinative language, much more than
| languages like English or French. This makes Turkish richly
| packed with meaning but also very complex.
| sinkasapa wrote:
| It is called evidentiality. It doesn't have any direct
| relationship to time, as one would expect with a tense. Southern
| Quechua has a reported event evidential affix as well. A friend
| who is a speaker of Quechua was once horrified, hearing that a
| man was going to be given a life sentence for murder in Bolivia.
| They played a portion of his confession over the radio, and the
| accused man used the reported event evidential through the
| entirety. Literally, saying that all his words were second hand,
| dubious information. To my friend, the implication was that he
| was saying what the police had told him to say. Apparently, those
| judging the case were not aware of the subtlety, and it did not
| come through in the Spanish translation of the confession,
| resulting in a conviction. Whatever the facts of the case were in
| the end, what is interesting is that for Quechua speakers like my
| friend, due to the use of the reported event evidential, there
| was no confession, even though all of the events of a murder were
| stated in the first person.
| sedatk wrote:
| It is a tense in Turkish though.
| fancymcpoopoo wrote:
| or so you've heard
| johnthewise wrote:
| You can also exaggrate/repeat it to convey that you don't
| actually believe it.
|
| "O gelmis" - "He/she (allegedly) came. "O gelmismis" " He/she
| (allegedly) came(but its bs).
| teractiveodular wrote:
| The closest equivalent in English is scare quotes. Works in
| spoken contexts too, just do finger quotes and change intonation
| a bit.
|
| You can use quotes neutrally: John says "the nuclear waste is
| totally safe".
|
| Or you can use them to cast subtle shade: John says the nuclear
| waste is "totally safe".
| Obscurity4340 wrote:
| > Geber-esi! die.like.a.dog-impr.3sg "May he die like a dog!"
|
| So thats where Trump gets his "like a dog" comparison he loves to
| whip out
| rdist wrote:
| Can we get this applied to print, broadcast and cable news
| programs?
| sedatk wrote:
| Ironically, it's not used in journalistic contexts in Turkish.
| It would seem amateurish if it were, like they weren't doing
| their jobs properly.
| 082349872349872 wrote:
| > _"L 'histoire est une suite de mensonges sur lesquels on est
| d'accord."_ --NB
|
| ("History is a bunch of lies upon which we all agree")
| joecool1029 wrote:
| https://nitter.poast.org/esesci/status/1843769276471349698
|
| (so you can view the thread without a login)
| darkhorn wrote:
| For first time I hear it as "gossip tense". Actually it is "a
| tense that you did not witness yourself" or officially "learned
| past tense".
| sedatk wrote:
| Yes, I coined the term myself (as I mention it later in the
| thread) because I thought it explained its function better.
| This was the thread that I first used it:
| https://x.com/esesci/status/1666152424564719639
|
| Now that I looked for it, others apparently came up with the
| same name for it before me. I think, that only validates its
| how apt it is :)
| svilen_dobrev wrote:
| Bulgarian has even more of these.. like whether one
| believes/trusts in what sh/e is (quoting of) being said (by
| someone else), and the like - "Dubitative" forms..
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bulgarian_verbs
| nickjj wrote:
| I know very little about speaking Turkish but one interesting
| thing I learned recently is there's a different word for aunt and
| uncle depending on if it's your mom or dad's side.
| incognito124 wrote:
| Slavic languages do that too
| depressedpanda wrote:
| I think that might be quite common. In Swedish we have
| morbror/farbror (literally mother-brother/father-brother) and
| moster/faster (mother's sister/father's sister). It's similar
| for grandparents.
| shultays wrote:
| Turkish also has distinct words for grandmothers that works
| in a similar way. Father is baba, mother is anne and for
| grandmothers we have "babaanne" "anneanne" (generally
| pronounced & shortened as "babane" and "anane")
|
| But interestingly no distinct words for grandfathers, both
| grandfathers are called "dede" (so no "babababa" or
| "annebaba")
| sedatk wrote:
| There is even a dedicated word in Turkish to describe the
| relationship between the husbands of sisters :)
| jofla_net wrote:
| I like to think that has to do with how strong family and
| 'extended' family ties are, relative to English speaking
| countries. When you spend soo much time with relatives you need
| more distinction. Theres even different words for the various
| forms of 'in-laws', sister-in-law, spouse of sister-in-law,
| etc.
|
| Theres a lot of "onto" mapping, things converging when
| translated, in both directions.
|
| Conversely as a counterexample, the turkish word kalmak, which
| is to stay, is used broadly in many instances where in English
| the most correct translation would use verbs such as "to
| remain", "to be left", in addition to the most straightforward
| "to stay".
| dkural wrote:
| It is also used to indicate surprise. "Sular gitmis!". "Bu yemek
| cok aci olmus!" - heard right after taking a bite :)
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