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Turkish language has a gossip tense

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Re: Turkish language has a gossip tense

#61
post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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.

Verb tense is distinct from conjugation (and semantics are a whole different matter altogether). Careful consideration doesnt make trending tweets.

Re: Turkish language has a gossip tense

#63
post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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.

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.

Re: Turkish language has a gossip tense

#64
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.

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.

Re: Turkish language has a gossip tense

#65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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

Yes, we much prefer speaking English over having to endure slow, broken Dutch.

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.

Re: Turkish language has a gossip tense

#66

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.

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

Ce quoi on dirait n'est pas vrai du tout.

Re: Turkish language has a gossip tense

#67
post #36

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?

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.

Re: Turkish language has a gossip tense

#68
post #42

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…

It is a tense. It’s literally taught as “learned past tense” in Turkish schools. It’s similar to present perfect tense of English.

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

Re: Turkish language has a gossip tense

#70
post #57
post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

Right, because "present" is the tense here and "perfect" the aspect.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Present_perfect

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