[HN Gopher] Turkish language has a gossip tense
___________________________________________________________________
Turkish language has a gossip tense
Author : sedatk
Score : 262 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!
| ted_bunny wrote:
| All other things being equal, I didn't feel up to the task of
| learning a language that regularly omits all vowels in
| written form. But man, that calligraphy...
| 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.
| diggan wrote:
| Very much so. We get a lot of tourists where I live
| (Spain) yet consistently the only tourists that come here
| and assume we speak their language (yes) are people
| speaking French. Everyone else seems to ask if I speak
| English before engaging, or they try to speak Spanish
| directly, while French-speaking people just start
| speaking French with you, seemingly assuming you also
| speak French, even though we're both in Spain...
| 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 :-)
| rjh29 wrote:
| It's scarily similar to Japanese in a lot of ways. Both are
| agglutinative languages.
| mmasu wrote:
| yes, when i was living in turkey and started learning
| turkish this is the thing that most impressed me. High
| similarity to Korean also.
| brnt wrote:
| Well, considering where Turkish (Turkic?) comes from,
| perhaps not a coincidence?
| mmasu wrote:
| indeed; but still incredible that it retained so many
| characteristics over time and at such great distance from
| origin! I had been very fascinated with this.
| indigo945 wrote:
| This _not_ being a coincidence is the Altaic Family
| Hypothesis, which posits that Turkic, Mongolic and often
| also Japonic and /or Korean languages form a superfamily,
| sharing a common ancestor. The hypothesis is mostly
| discredited by present-day linguistics.
| brnt wrote:
| Is that the only explanation though? Could proximity
| explain things? It is my private theory that German and
| Polish having had so much geographic overlap explains
| some common features, despite being from different
| families.
| anticensor wrote:
| Turkish doesn't have articles, I think you meant determiner
| adjectives there.
| egeozcan wrote:
| A tourist who can speak a few sentences in Turkish could get
| a lot of free stuff in small shops when I used to live in
| Istanbul. My "cute" French didn't have the same effect in
| Paris though.
| foobarian wrote:
| Going the other way around, coming from a Slavic language I
| was really surprised at how many Turkish words we have. I
| didn't realize this until watching the show Dirilis:
| Ertugrul, and doing a double take every other line. "Why are
| there so many Serbo-Croat words in there???"
|
| The "error tolerance" you mention is interesting, especially
| in contrast with Mandarin. My understanding is that messing
| up the intonation there can completely alter the meaning of
| words, leading to trope situations where the foreigner says
| something embarrassing and all the native speakers laugh.
| MichaelZuo wrote:
| It's even worse for Cantonese, at least from what I noticed
| when travelling in HK. Where speakers are pretty much
| forced to shout out every single word when there's any
| background noise whatsoever. (or get very close to their
| interlocutor's ears, practically lips touching earlobes)
| techcode wrote:
| AFAIK very few "Serbo-Croatian" words got adopted by
| Turkish/Ottoman - I only know of "kraljica".
|
| On the other hand - during ~500 years (within last ~625
| years) that Ottomans occupied most of Balkans - many words
| stuck around to this day.
|
| For example: Jok, Jorgan, Dzezva, Masala ...etc
| 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.
| diggan wrote:
| I'm assuming you've been to France and particularly
| Paris? I wouldn't say every French person is unfriendly,
| but my anecdotal evidence seems to point to there being a
| higher rate of unfriendly people (towards tourists
| perhaps) in France (mostly in the south of France + Paris
| twice), compared to other places I've visited as a
| tourist.
| kelseyfrog wrote:
| You would tutoyer a stranger?
| seszett wrote:
| It depends on the context and the age of the stranger. If
| it's at work (some random sysadmin or dev at a client,
| say) yes I would, in the street I wouldn't. In Quebec
| it's more common to _tutoyer_ strangers than in Europe,
| too.
| ted_bunny wrote:
| You found Turkish grammar easy compared to french? What was
| your first language?
|
| It was really nice to not have to mess with too much of a case
| system, after Russian.
| 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?
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| Because "learned" and "reported" aren't aspects? Aspect
| describes the temporal structure of an event - for
| example, it might occur at a single moment, or it might
| occur at several discrete points in time ("I walk his dog
| every Saturday"), or it might occur over a continuous
| duration.
|
| Mood describes the relationship of an event to reality.
| sedatk wrote:
| Ok, let me correct my question:
|
| Why is "present perfect tense" closer to a tense, but
| "learned past tense" is closer to a mood?
| yongjik wrote:
| In school grammar, "present perfect" is a tense. School
| grammars are basically tradition, so you can call it
| whatever you want as long as you agree with long-dead
| grammarians. Ditto for Turkish - I'm sure it has its own
| dead grammarians.
|
| In modern grammar, "present perfect" is not "close to a
| tense" - it's a combination of present tense and perfect
| aspect.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| We can say a little more; in traditional grammar, aspect
| is not a recognized category. Thus, while it is very
| clear that Latin has a system of three tenses, two
| aspects, and three moods (counting imperative),
| traditional grammar assigns it six "tenses":
| +---------+-----------+------------------+ |
| tense | aspect | traditional name |
| +---------+-----------+------------------+ |
| present | imperfect | present |
| +---------+-----------+------------------+ |
| past | imperfect | imperfect |
| +---------+-----------+------------------+ |
| future | imperfect | future |
| +---------+-----------+------------------+ |
| present | perfect | perfect |
| +---------+-----------+------------------+ |
| past | perfect | pluperfect |
| +---------+-----------+------------------+ |
| future | perfect | future perfect |
| +---------+-----------+------------------+
|
| This is the reason for calling perfect a "tense": it's
| traditional. But this model won't stand up to analysis.
| Interestingly, the Romans themselves do not seem to have
| used it; where we refer to "pluperfect tense", they
| referred to the "past perfect-er tense", identifying both
| tense and aspect (admittedly, both under the name
| "tense", or rather "time"). I don't know when the
| conceptual distinction was lost.
| yongjik wrote:
| To nitpick: under modern analysis "future" is not a tense
| in English: the future verb "will" (or "shall") behaves
| much more like "can", "may", "must" and so on - they're
| collectively called modal verbs, i.e., in English future
| is a mood.
| LudwigNagasena wrote:
| A tense expressed through a modal verb is still a tense.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| Linguistics does draw the distinction between syntactic
| "tense" and semantic "time", but in that case English
| modal verbs wouldn't reflect "moods" at all, just
| "modality". They're all periphrastic. The same goes for
| perfect aspect, also periphrastic in English, though I
| don't know offhand how (or whether!) there is a
| terminological difference between syntactically-marked
| aspect and semantically-present aspect.
|
| The same objection would theoretically apply to voice,
| where the English passive voice must be periphrastic too,
| but in that case everyone agrees that this is a
| distinction of voice and the difference between
| inflection (where grammatical meaning is expressed by
| changing the form of a single word) and periphrasis
| (where grammatical meaning is expressed by combining
| multiple words) isn't relevant. This is just an
| inconsistency in modern theory, which probably arose
| because voice isn't relevant to semantics at all.
|
| Ignoring the modal auxiliaries, English would still have
| moods, subjunctive ("We demand that Robert _be_ ejected
| from the book club ") and irrealis ("If Robert _were_ to
| be ejected from the book club, ... "), but neither of
| those is in a particularly robust state in the modern
| language.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > Why is "present perfect tense" closer to a tense, but
| "learned past tense" is closer to a mood?
|
| Are you thinking of these as exclusive categories? Every
| finite verb has a tense _and_ a mood. That 's the point
| of having separate terms; these are independent
| dimensions of the verb.
|
| Theoretically, there could also be a "reported present"
| verb form, except that this is semantically impossible:
| any event that has been reported to you must have
| happened before the report did, and the report must have
| happened before you started talking about it, so reported
| events are stuck in the past.
|
| It's possible, though, to imagine someone making a
| statement about reported information in the future, in
| which case the event would take place before the report,
| but possibly after I describe how I'm imagining the
| future. Would anything interesting happen in Turkish for
| this kind of sentence?
| tukantje wrote:
| -mis'li gecmis zaman or "inferential past tense" is
| "inferential mood" and "past tense".
|
| Essentially old school people categorised tenses out of
| thin air; and modern linguists define tenses as "time
| reference",mood as "modality signalling" that is
| "relationship to the reality / truth" and aspect as
| "expression of how something extends over time". So
| aspect doesn't apply here.
|
| So -mis'li gecmis zaman is a tense and a mood. Sometimes.
|
| Sometimes it is something altogether different such as
| mirativity (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mirativity).
|
| PS: I have to say, I'm surprised your handle in HN isn't
| @ssg :)
| 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.
| mplewis wrote:
| The inferential mood (your "gossip tense") is more
| related to _mood_ (signals a particular relationship to
| truth or reality) than _tense_ (signifies a relationship
| to time).
| sedatk wrote:
| Why isn't it the case with the use of the term "present
| perfect tense" in English then, despite "perfect" being
| an aspect, not even a tense? How is present perfect
| closer to a tense, but this one closer to a mood? What's
| the difference?
| rvense wrote:
| Well, "present perfect" would refer to a specific
| construction that has both tense (vs. past perfect) and
| aspect (vs. present continuous).
|
| But as per my other comment, if you're just listing all
| the constructions an English word can take for your
| students to memorise, you can just call them all tenses
| and be done with it.
| marcellus23 wrote:
| You're correct that it conveys some temporal information.
| You're incorrect that that makes it a tense. The
| imperative mood in English ("Go do this!") can be said to
| convey a future act. After all, you can't order someone
| to have done something in the past, or to be doing
| something right now. But that doesn't mean we refer to it
| as the "imperative tense".
|
| If you look up the definition of grammatical mood on
| Wikipedia, along with tense and aspect, can you explain
| why you think this meets the definition of a tense and
| not a mood?
| amoss wrote:
| "Keep at it!", "Hold the line!" appear to be orders to be
| doing something right now.
| mkl wrote:
| They're orders to continue a present activity into the
| future.
| amoss wrote:
| Is the continuation not an activity in the present time,
| or that starts in the present time? Characterizing this
| as being in the futures seems to be an incorrect boundary
| case.
| mkl wrote:
| They're definitely orders about the future. "Keep at it"
| has the present as context, "hold the line" is a bit
| ambiguous, "don't let it happen again" has the past as
| context, but they're all talking about the future.
| sedatk wrote:
| I didn't say it doesn't act as a mood. I'm saying that it
| acts as a tense, and therefore I can name it as such, as
| how grammar forefathers named "present perfect tense" in
| English despite all the objections from HN about
| "perfect" being an aspect. :)
| rvense wrote:
| It really depends on whether you take the term tense to
| refer to a semantic category or just a set of
| constructions (surface forms).
| marcellus23 wrote:
| You can call anything whatever you want, that doesn't
| make it correct.
| mda wrote:
| It coveys "the" temporal information in the sentence and
| it is always past. E.g. A children's story only contains
| this nothing else.
| marcellus23 wrote:
| Imperative also conveys "the" temporal information in the
| clause and it is always past.
| akvadrako wrote:
| "Don't do that" can refer to the past, though it's
| unnatural to use a past tense verb.
|
| But it can be explicit in Dutch:
|
| Reed dan ook niet zo hard.
|
| (drove then also not so fast)
| franciscop wrote:
| It's very funny as a Spaniard since "verbal tense" in
| Spanish is literally "verbal time" (tiempo(s) verbal), so
| it's unequivocally not able to describe things that are not
| temporal:
|
| https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiempo_verbal
|
| Even more interestingly, that article links in English to
| the TAM (Tense-Aspect-Mood):
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tense%E2%80%93aspect%E2%80%93
| m...
| rvense wrote:
| English "Tense" is also derived from "tempus"!
| the_gipsy wrote:
| > unequivocally not able to describe things that are not
| temporal
|
| I don't think you can take it that literally. The are
| conditional and subjective verb forms:
|
| "Comeria cuando llegaras".
| anticensor wrote:
| Same in Turkish, we call them "eylemin zamanlari" which
| stands for "times of verbs".
| anticensor wrote:
| Yeah, morphologically two dimensional, but semantically
| 1.5: 17 or so tense-aspect-mood combinations make sense,
| fewer than 25 the underlying morphology would suggest.
| egeozcan wrote:
| But "-mis" denotes something happening in the past, in
| gossip form, on its own. It's trickier than what that table
| shows IMHO.
| 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.
| rdtsc wrote:
| > What "Turkish schools" call it is irrelevant, it adds
| "colour" to an event
|
| Wouldn't Turkish schools know more what their language's
| rules and meaning is better than Hacker News?
| marcellus23 wrote:
| A schoolteacher's goal is for their students to be able
| to write and speak an individual language. The goal of
| linguistics is to be able to understand and describe
| human language as a whole using a system of consistent
| rules and terminology. So, no, Turkish schoolteachers
| would not know the linguistics of Turkish better than
| linguists, just like a chef would not know the underlying
| chemistry of cooking better than a chemist.
| rdtsc wrote:
| > So, no, Turkish schoolteachers would not know the
| linguistics of Turkish better than linguists
|
| Yes they do, because schoolteachers don't each invent
| their linguistic terminology as they go along in
| isolation, it's done by some regulatory governing body.
| Something like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turkish_Lang
| uage_Association. If anything, that's more centralized
| and controlled than what our countries have. So then it's
| not between the word of linguists on HN and some random
| primary school teacher in Turkey, but between the Turkish
| linguists deciding about their language and HN linguists.
|
| And I am sure HN linguists think they know all the
| languages (programming or otherwise) better than anyone
| else, but somehow I doubt that.
| acchow wrote:
| I think you are both right but are talking about
| different things.
|
| In elementary school in Canada, I was taught phonetics to
| help learn sounding words out. This was absolutely a
| government-sanctioned curriculum. I was taught that the
| sounds are categorized as either consonants or vowels.
| Every English speaker can confirm that of course this is
| correct.
|
| But then you major in linguistics and discover that the
| elementary school definition of consonants and vowels is
| actually not quite right. And you can't even categorize
| certain sounds well (such as the "w" in "we", which is
| actually pronounced with a mostly open vocal tract).
| mcnamaratw wrote:
| Nobody knows anything better than HN, ever.
| rdtsc wrote:
| Exactly, right? "We'll create a fast paced start-up to
| help Turkish people understand their own language". You
| gotta admire both the boldness and stupidity at the same
| time!
| LudwigNagasena wrote:
| Teaching X as a first language, teaching X as a second
| language and analysing X from the standpoint of
| linguistics are three different things/jobs/fields.
| 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
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > English is pretty low on moods
|
| English is fairly low on inflection. It's not low on moods; one
| of the more important syntactic categories is the modal
| auxiliary verbs.
| user3939382 wrote:
| I was recently reading about a native american language with
| this feature (was is Cherokee?) Pretty cool.
| bee_rider wrote:
| I often hear about these fun features of other languages and
| wonder if it is the case that English is a particularly simple
| language. Alternatively, maybe these features just sound fun
| because they are novel to me.
| DougMerritt wrote:
| To a first approximation(see note) all natural languages have
| similar complexity, it just comes out in different parts of
| the language. Languages with fewer moods make up for it with
| synonymous constructions that use more words.
|
| (note) linguists argue about this just like they argue about
| everything else, but it is the safer assumption for non-
| linguists.
| bee_rider wrote:
| I wonder if anybody who's learned English would be willing
| to share some bits they found unusual or unique?
| idlewords wrote:
| A few things--articles in English (the, a) are subtle as
| hell and extremely difficult to use correctly if you're
| not a native speaker.
|
| The way you can verb any noun is super interesting and
| productive.
|
| And having to memorize the idiomatic different meanings
| of a billion verb + preposition combinations (take up,
| take down, take over, take in, take away, take on) is a
| real treat for learners.
| bee_rider wrote:
| The takeaway is: take down "take in."
| scrollaway wrote:
| > _articles in English (the, a) are subtle as hell and
| extremely difficult to use correctly if you 're not a
| native speaker._
|
| Found the Slavic speaker ;)
|
| The/A construction is similar in most Latin languages.
|
| Absolutely agree on the other two features though. It's
| kinda crazy and I have no idea how I actually learned
| those things... they just "happened" into my head. (I'm
| not a native speaker)
| LudwigNagasena wrote:
| Articles exist in Romance languages, that's true, but
| they are subtly different. You usually wouldn't say "the
| Tuesday" in English but you would often say "el martes"
| in Spanish; "tennis" vs "el tenis"; "I don't have a car"
| vs "no tengo coche" and so on.
| mjd wrote:
| My Korean tutor said the same thing about "the". I said
| "doesn't it just mean there is only one instance?" and he
| replied "the police".
|
| For the benefit of other folks wanting to follow up the
| "take off" thing: it's called a "phrasal verb".
| egeozcan wrote:
| Turkish doesn't have article(s) and "the" is usually very
| confusing when you first start. But then I learned German
| too...
| MichaelZuo wrote:
| How does Turkish handle addressing something like 'the
| police' in sentence structure? (without using anything
| similar to 'the')
|
| e.g. 'The police force has expanded recently in this
| city.'
| justsomehnguy wrote:
| 'Police force has expanded recently in this city.'
| egeozcan wrote:
| Nothing. "Polis (police), son (latest) zamanlarda (times,
| at) bu (this) sehirde (city, within) faaliyetlerini
| (operations) arttirdi (increased)."
|
| If I'm talking about a specific police officer, then I'd
| use "o", which means he/she/it/that.
|
| O geldi -> he/she/it/that arrived.
|
| O polis geldi -> that police arrived.
|
| Ona polis geldi -> police arrived to him/her (his/her
| place).
|
| polis geldi -> the police (has) arrived.
|
| O _bahsettigin_ polis geldi - > The police officer _you
| were talking about_ (has) arrived.
| justsomehnguy wrote:
| Ah, yes, many languages do not need to specifically
| distinguish between 'police' and 'police force'.
| MichaelZuo wrote:
| How do you differentiate between the abstract concept of
| police, the concept of police forces as an organizational
| unit, and the specific police force that exists within a
| specific city?
| egeozcan wrote:
| If I understood you correctly, you just name them. The
| default is the concept, and most of the time people do
| not feel the need to separate some specific police force,
| because it's apparent from the context. Some specific
| police force aren't likely to expand their operations in
| the city.
|
| On the other hand, I think I may also be failing to
| explain this correctly because we are already at the
| limits of my English :)
| MichaelZuo wrote:
| Thanks, but you don't need to explain how if you're
| unsure.
|
| If you can just write one example in Turkish, of each
| case, so three total, most readers can probably puzzle it
| out with enough time using translation tools.
| tukantje wrote:
| Turkish, in comparison to English, is a language that is
| less lexically dense. So in this instance; you don't
| really need to specify anything; but that also means a
| lot of sentences _get longer due to said lack of lexical
| density requiring more words to be used, for clarity's
| sake and / or heavier reliance on context_. Which follows
| the cultural lines quite well - Turkish culture is a
| _high context culture_ whereas English culture is not
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-context_and_low-
| context_c...).
| MichaelZuo wrote:
| The high-context culture would seem to be an adaption to
| the lower lexical density, if that's the case?
|
| e.g. to save on space, paper, writing effort, etc...,
| Turkish writers have to rely on the reader reading in-
| between the lines to a greater extent than a similar
| English writer would in a similar position.
|
| And after many generations of writers competing, it
| simply became the default norm.
| anticensor wrote:
| Five different "the"s, three different "of"s, two
| different "from"s, six different "a"s.
| 3eb7988a1663 wrote:
| I have an ESL colleague (who speaks fantastic English)
| and she has repeatedly asked me to spellcheck important
| documents because she is concerned she will "mess up the
| articles".
|
| After she said it, I realized the incredible subtlety in
| communication that can be expressed by the
| position/omission of key articles.
| ruuda wrote:
| Pronunciation bears little relation to how words are
| written. For the longest time I thought I knew how to
| pronounce Greenwich, because I knew how to pronounce
| 'green' and 'sandwich'. (Or things like advertising vs.
| advertisement, etc.) I saw a joke somewhere that western
| people think Chinese must be difficult because you have
| to memorize the pronunciation of so many symbols, but
| English is no different.
| spongebobism wrote:
| idlewords mentioned some good ones. While English doesn't
| have many moods, it still has relatively many verb forms
| (just take a look at past tenses: I ate, I've eaten, I
| had eaten, I was eating, I have been eating, I had been
| eating...). In most contexts, only one of them is
| idiomatic, and knowing which one takes a _lot_ of
| studying. Also, English has a fixed order for adjectives
| [1]. AFAIK, this is unusual cross-linguistically - at
| least in my native language, "big red ball" and "red big
| ball" would both be idiomatic. If you're really curious,
| you can take a look at the contents of an English grammar
| for advanced learners. What gets a lot of chapters,
| probably trips up a lot of learners. [2]
|
| [1] https://www.espressoenglish.net/order-of-adjectives-
| in-engli... [2] https://assets.cambridge.org/97811076/998
| 92/frontmatter/9781...
| anticensor wrote:
| Turkish native speaker here. -mis is indeed a tense (can be
| used as a base tense in the indicative past, or as a compound
| tense to add nonevidentiality in any other verb form).
| mcnamaratw wrote:
| It's cool that you're a native speaker, but the typical HN
| commenter is at a much higher level of proficiency than that.
|
| Irony notice. This comment contains irony.
| tarkin2 wrote:
| You should have used the ironic mood if you'd wanted us to
| understand the irony
| thwg wrote:
| IMHO, it would be more correct-mis, in terms of linguistics
| at least, to call it an "aspect" than a "tense".
| forgot-im-old wrote:
| In "bad moods", "Halim yok" is more often used as "I'm worn-
| out".
|
| In "good moods", is more often used as "I'm on game, winning"
| or "I'm on fire" Others are about good mood in different tenses
| etc.
| JBiserkov wrote:
| In Bulgarian there is "double inferential" mood, used to relate
| reported speech _about the speaker_.
|
| Usually used when the speaker got drunk and has no memory of
| the thing they did. a.k.a. "past forgotten" tense. The double
| inferential also reflects the fact that the witness account
| maybe inaccurate/exaggerated either because the witness(es)
| were themselves drunk or because they knew the speaker cannot
| dispute their account.
|
| The most extreme form is when the speaker doesn't even remember
| getting drunk ("Bil s'm se bil napil.) and/or getting in a
| fight ("Bil s'm se bil bil.").
|
| The extra pun comes from "fought" and "was" being spelled and
| pronounced the same.
|
| It also rhymes.
| adriand wrote:
| That's so interesting and also kind of crazy. Do these forms
| of speech come with their own verb conjugations and so on,
| making them difficult for people who learn the language as a
| non-native speaker? What about young children, do they
| understand it?
| anticensor wrote:
| Yes, it does.
| eastbound wrote:
| Is the purpose only when getting drunk and did it arise out
| of an alcohol culture? (If so, why doesn't British English
| have more tenses)
|
| I often joke that Polish has several singulars and several
| plurals, because you know, 1-2 beers is singular, 3-4 is just
| tipsy, 4-6 is a real drink, but 4-24 is a real plural. But
| after 25+, you don't remember so might as well restart from
| 0. But it's a joke, because it applies to other things than
| beer.
|
| So, do they use that tense for ministers/news reporting, or
| in jokes, or when a program reports errors from the user?
| emrah wrote:
| Well it has an implied tense, it refers to the past by itself.
| It is possible to combine it with a tense, for example the
| future tense to report that someone said they will do something
| in the future
| hliyan wrote:
| My native language (Sinhalese) has this too. One just adds the
| suffix "-loo" to the end of any sentence and it becomes
| hearsay.
| nsenifty wrote:
| Same in Kannada, a South Indian language. You prefix "-ante"
| (roughly, _it is said_) and you can disown everything you
| say.
| aib wrote:
| (Not directed at the parent comment but the thread in general)
|
| I don't know why people are more interested in labeling it than
| explaining it. (Although admittedly, they go side by side.)
|
| Every grammatical aspect of "past time with -mis" (which is how
| I learned it) is the same as the other one, "past time with
| -di". As in, I cannot think of a sentence where replacing one
| suffix with the other would result in a syntax error, or any
| semantic difference other than certainty.
|
| A point of confusion might be verbs made into adjectives using
| -mis, although I'm having a hard time coming up with many
| examples where there's an ambiguity between the adjective and
| the "tense". Doesn't help that the assertive(?) case is without
| suffix, so "pismis" might mean "[it is] [a] cooked [one]" or
| "[Apparently it was] cooked".
|
| Another point of parallelism between the two past "tenses" is
| that it's perfectly valid to answer a question in one with the
| other. (Or is this a general language or tense thing? Hmm.)
| anticensor wrote:
| That's a Turkish&Bulgarian thing, many other languages with
| inferentials have inferentials with aorist aspect, not ones
| with preterite aspect.
| 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.
| tetris11 wrote:
| Its also very important to slowly yell in this tense, when
| giving a public speech to more than 10 people. It doesn't
| matter if there is a mic or not, the words must carry with
| the wind and strike the hearts of all who hear it.
| 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.
| BiteCode_dev wrote:
| "On dirait" est utilise par les enfants de 6 ans pour
| parler de jouer un role, mais pas vraiment par les
| adultes pour reporter un commerage.
| BiteCode_dev wrote:
| BS (Baliverne Saugrenue)!
|
| La tournure correcte, "voudrait" n'est en pratique que tres
| peu utilisee pour le temoignage indirect au quotidien.
|
| "Il parait qu'on a voulu te faire croire que ce genre de
| phrase n'est employee que dans des oeuvres litteraires et
| televisuelles" est beaucoup plus realiste.
|
| Indicatif + participe passe, ou imparfait. Le conditionnel
| est surtout utilise pour l'hypothetique non lie aux ragots
| et encore, par des gens comme dans ce thread qui se
| soucient de leur language.
|
| Par contre, au journal de 20h: "on dit dans les milieux
| autorises qu'un accord secret aurait ete signe" est tout a
| fait courant.
| 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.
| hanifc wrote:
| How would that be phrased in Spanish? Are you talking
| about the future tense in constructions like "Sera
| que...?" or "Estara volviendo" to say "he must be
| returning"?
| nachexnachex wrote:
| Julia habria dormido con Pedro anoche.
|
| As explained, mood is implied. This is a common pattern
| in news reports, etc., not quite colloquial
| cryptonector wrote:
| Yeah, it's very common in news because it's a very
| concise way to indicate the possibility of doubt because
| it's just "gossip" (as the title here would have it).
| selimthegrim wrote:
| Yes we do, "...will have slept..."
| jfengel wrote:
| Merci.
| 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.
| anticensor wrote:
| French has four base tenses and four compounding aspects.
| 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.
| mplewis wrote:
| As described in the other thread, this is known as the
| _inferential mood_ in Turkish:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inferential_mood
| sedatk wrote:
| It is a tense. It can simultaneously function as a mood,
| that doesn't change its tense status. It changes the time
| aspect of a verb. I don't know how more tense you can be
| than that.
| 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.
| anticensor wrote:
| But it is in Azerbaijani (they also tend to makeshift the non
| finite verb suffix -ub as the perfective).
| 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 :)
| anticensor wrote:
| It's called past inferential in linguistic terms (all non-
| past inferentials in Turkish are compound tenses, but the
| past inferential is a base tense).
| 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")
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| In Chinese the terms will also distinguish whether the
| brother/sister is older or younger than your parent is.
| noisy_boy wrote:
| Bengali does that too and even allows for age based
| relative positioning by using a "prefix" +
| "relationship_name": - Father's side:
| Uncle: Older than father
| (age_position_prefix + Jethu): 1.
| Eldest: Boro Jethu 2. After him:
| Mejo Jethu 3. After him: Sejo Jethu
| 4. After him: Chhoto Jethu Younger than
| father (age_position_prefix + Kaaku):
| 5. Eldest: Boro Kaaku 6. After him:
| Mejo Kaaku 7. After him: Sejo Kaaku
| 8. After him: Chhoto Kaaku Aunt:
| Same age_position_prefix as above but common suffix: Pishi
| - Mother's side: Uncle: Same
| age_position_prefix as that on the father's side but common
| suffix: Maama Aunt: Same
| age_position_prefix as that on the father's side but common
| suffix: Maashi Boro means eldest
| Mejo means middle Sejo means younger than the
| middle Chhoto means youngest
|
| So men on the father's side have more dedicated words than
| others.
| sedatk wrote:
| There is even a dedicated word in Turkish to describe the
| relationship between the husbands of sisters :)
| noisy_boy wrote:
| Bengali has it too: Bhairabhai (Bhai = brother so the Bhaira
| prefix qualifies the brotherly nature of the relationship)
| 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".
| Jun8 wrote:
| Many languages have more kin terms than English, which is
| especially poor in this sense. In Turkish, as you comment, we
| have:
|
| * Aunt (father's side) - _hala_
|
| * Aunt (mother's side) - _teyze_
|
| * Uncle (father's side) - _amca_
|
| * Uncle (mother's side) - _dayi_
|
| You use _teyze_ to refer to an unknown older woman and _amca_
| to an unknown older men (similar to how "uncle" is used in
| Mandarin).
|
| With this more explicit vocabulary, interesting things can be
| expressed succinctly that would be cumbersome in English (see
| Sapir-Whorf :-), eg boys take after their _dayi_ and girls
| after their _hala_ or that as a general consensus you like your
| _teyze_ better than your _hala_.
|
| We also have terms for older sister ( _abla_ ) and older
| brother ( _abi_ ).
| dkural wrote:
| It is also used to indicate surprise. "Sular gitmis!". "Bu yemek
| cok aci olmus!" - heard right after taking a bite :)
| tetris11 wrote:
| How would you say: he allegedly died in front of me.
|
| O gozumden oldumek?
| sedatk wrote:
| "Gozumun onunde olmus" ("o" is implied) but in that case it
| means a later realization of the death because the you missed
| that when he was dying.
|
| That might happen, for example, when you're in a train, and
| you think the person in front of you is sleeping. At some
| point you realize that he's dead and then you might form a
| sentence like that.
|
| If you had witnessed the person dying when he was dying, not
| as an after the fact realization, then you'd say "gozumun
| onunde oldu". Because you knew he was dying when it was
| happening.
| tradertef wrote:
| This tense is the easiest way to understand if someone's first
| language is Turkish. Even my Turkish friends who are born in
| Turkey misses this if they learned the language in school, e.g.,
| Laz friends.
| rickcarlino wrote:
| Is this similar to -daeyo endings in Korean used for indirect
| quotation?
| krick wrote:
| As otgers have said, a mood, not a tense. The same thing exists
| in Latvian. "Vins ir" = "he is", "vins esot" = "he _allegedly_ is
| ".
| sedatk wrote:
| It's a tense. Without it, the verb would be tenseless, in its
| imperative form:
|
| gel -> come
|
| gelmis -> he/she/it came. (hearsay)
|
| geldi -> he/she/it came. (factual)
|
| It's not optional either.
| krick wrote:
| No, it doesn't make it a tense. Different moods may have
| their own form in one or more tenses and it has nothing to do
| with being "optional" either. To be fair, distinction is a
| bit artificial, but _generally_ these are defined by their
| meaning. "Tense" applies to variability in time (past,
| present, etc), and "mood" applies to variability in reality
| (factual statement, hearsay, wishful thinking, etc)
| sedatk wrote:
| Okay, but this causes variability in time? I don't
| understand. Is there a rule in linguistics that any tense
| that also has another semantic function can't ever be
| called a tense? Then, what are these 13,000 Google Scholar
| articles that refers to an imaginary "Present Perfect
| Tense" in English? https://scholar.google.com/scholar?looku
| p=0&q=%22present+per...
| krick wrote:
| There is no "rule", it's just how these terms are defined
| and what they are supposed to mean if we are pedantic
| enough with how we use them.
|
| "Present perfect" is a tense (or, if we are really
| pedantic, it's a tense and an aspect), because it's about
| time of action (the process described was happening in
| the past, but now it's finished, and it has some result).
| In a sense, this is not even about the language, it's an
| aspect of reality, except we don't say that all languages
| have present perfect tense, because in many languages
| there is no grammatic form to express it. If English had
| a way to express hearsay grammatically, we could say it
| has renarrative/inferential mood. Furthermore, these are
| two kinda independent axis. If English had a grammatic
| variation for depending on if it's a hearsay only for the
| present perfect, we'd say it has renarrative mood in
| present perfect tense, but doesn't have in any other
| tense (even though, obviously, in real English we can
| kinda express similar meaning by adding the word
| "allegedly" to any tense, but there's no grammatic
| variation, so we say english doesn't have such mood, but
| then, one can argue that the same can be said about the
| word "have", so the line is a bit blurry).
|
| See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tense%E2%80%93aspect%E2
| %80%93m...
| sedatk wrote:
| Thanks, but I still don't understand why I get the
| pedantry when I call this a tense, but the founding
| fathers of English grammar walk scot-free by calling it
| "present perfect tense" instead of "present tense perfect
| aspect"? Why is this even a debate with me specifically,
| I don't get it :)
|
| It's obvious that tenses that serve other functions can
| also be called a tense, and yet keep their supplemental
| grammatical roles. Why is there a resistance to accept
| this in my case? :)
| darkhorn wrote:
| Thank you for your English/Latvian centric language
| perspective but there are lots of different tenses in
| different languages. They are not tought as moods. All are
| tenses.
|
| You can read Turkish or Bulgarian grammer books. They all
| are tenses. There is no such thing as mood.
| onursurme wrote:
| It is not gossip tense. There is no such name in Turkish grammar.
| revskill wrote:
| Is it an adverb? Possibly ?
| nurettin wrote:
| There is past tense, with 'di' 'diler' postfix. Example:
| 'dediler' > 'they said'
|
| This one is literally called "past tense with 'mis'". Example:
| 'demisler' > 'they supposedly said'.
| akaralar wrote:
| this is an "irrealis mood", there are quite a few of them with
| different functions, see:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irrealis_mood
|
| language is fascinating.
| mesutpiskin wrote:
| There are two past tense forms in Turkish, both of which have
| been used since the Old Turkish period. Our suffixes for the
| witnessed past tense are "-dI / -dU." This suffix is explained as
| the witnessed past tense because the action occurred in front of
| the speaker's eyes in the past. Our suffixes for the inferential
| past tense are "-mIs / -mUs." These suffixes express that the
| action took place at an unseen time in the past. In today's
| written language, only "-mIs / -mUs" suffixes are used as the
| inferential past tense markers.
|
| ref: https://turkishstudies.net/DergiTamDetay.aspx?ID=14135
| thwg wrote:
| It's not a _tense_. It 's called evidentiality.
| sedatk wrote:
| Whether it's a tense or not is both mentioned in the thread,
| and discussed here on this HN post under two or three threads
| now. How did you manage to miss all that? :)
| joelignaatius wrote:
| What is the minimum set of grammar for which all other grammar in
| a language can be constructed? So if Turkish has a gossip tense
| then we know we can construct that tense from English right? I'm
| thinking in terms of conlangs but not just binary.
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