Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Turkish language has a gossip tense

twitter.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 258 posts

Re: Turkish language has a gossip tense

#31

Post by davidzweig »

geoka9 wrote: post #21
farmeroy wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Also many Iranians speak 'Turk' and understand Turkish from watching Turkish telenovelas on satellite TV.

Re: Turkish language has a gossip tense

#32

Post by makmanalp »

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…

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 :-)

Re: Turkish language has a gossip tense

#33

Post by BiteCode_dev »

_9y71 wrote: post #24

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 wonder…

Note that French does have a tense for gossip.

You can say: julie aurait couché 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.

Re: Turkish language has a gossip tense

#34

Post by psychoslave »

BiteCode_dev wrote: post #33
_9y71 wrote: post #24

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 wonder…

Note that French does have a tense for gossip. You can say: julie aurait couché 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.

Il paraît que quelqu'un voudrait faire croire que ce genre de phrase n'est employé que dans des œuvres littéraires et télévisuelles. :)

Re: Turkish language has a gossip tense

#35

Post by geoka9 »

davidzweig wrote: post #31
geoka9 wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Also many Iranians speak 'Turk' and understand Turkish from watching Turkish telenovelas on satellite TV.

Good point! Although, what they call 'Turk' is actually Azeri :) (Part of the historical Azerbaijan is in Iran.)

Re: Turkish language has a gossip tense

#36

Post by jfengel »

BiteCode_dev wrote: post #33
_9y71 wrote: post #24

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 wonder…

Note that French does have a tense for gossip. You can say: julie aurait couché 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.

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?

Re: Turkish language has a gossip tense

#37

Post by petesergeant »

pjmlp wrote: post #29
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 learni…

> 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

Re: Turkish language has a gossip tense

#38

Post by Sharlin »

shawndrost wrote: post #22
aebtebeten wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There's a similar quasi-mood in colloquial Finnish, humorously called "aggressive": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aggressive_mood

Re: Turkish language has a gossip tense

#39

Post by _9y71 »

jfengel wrote: post #36
BiteCode_dev wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Note that French does have a tense for gossip. You can say: julie aurait couché 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.

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?

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.

Re: Turkish language has a gossip tense

#40

Post by vidarh »

pjmlp wrote: post #29
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 learni…

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...

Post reply on HN