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Turkish language has a gossip tense

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Re: Turkish language has a gossip tense

#21

Post by geoka9 »

farmeroy wrote: post #13
rich_sasha wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

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 o…

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.

Re: Turkish language has a gossip tense

#22

Post by shawndrost »

aebtebeten wrote: post #12
idlewords wrote: post #8

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 oth…

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:…

> 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.

Re: Turkish language has a gossip tense

#23

Post by appplication »

aebtebeten wrote: post #12
idlewords wrote: post #8

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 oth…

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:…

This was a fun and informative comment, thank you for sharing.

Re: Turkish language has a gossip tense

#24

Post by _9y71 »

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.

Re: Turkish language has a gossip tense

#25

Post by sinkasapa »

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.

Re: Turkish language has a gossip tense

#27

Post by blacksmith_tb »

rich_sasha wrote: post #9
farmeroy wrote: post #4

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…

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...

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!

Re: Turkish language has a gossip tense

#28

Post by jcul »

readthenotes1 wrote: post #19
farmeroy wrote: post #4

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…

"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

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!

Re: Turkish language has a gossip tense

#29

Post by pjmlp »

farmeroy wrote: post #4

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…

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.

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