Is this similar to -대요 endings in Korean used for indirect quotation?
Turkish language has a gossip tense
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Re: Turkish language has a gossip tense
#102Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
How would that be phrased in Spanish? Are you talking about the future tense in constructions like "Será que...?" or "Estará volviendo" to say "he must be returning"?
Re: Turkish language has a gossip tense
#103Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
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.
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).
Re: Turkish language has a gossip tense
#104It 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 evidenti…
It is a tense in Turkish though.
As described in the other thread, this is known as the inferential mood in Turkish: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inferential_mood
Re: Turkish language has a gossip tense
#105This 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…
> 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.
Re: Turkish language has a gossip tense
#106Earlier quoted context omitted.
Right, because "present" is the tense here and "perfect" the aspect. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Present_perfect
Ok, how is that different than "learned"/"reported" being the aspect and "past" being the tense in Turkish?
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.
Re: Turkish language has a gossip tense
#107Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 "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.
> 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?
Re: Turkish language has a gossip tense
#108I 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.
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.
In Chinese the terms will also distinguish whether the brother/sister is older or younger than your parent is.
Re: Turkish language has a gossip tense
#109As otgers have said, a mood, not a tense. The same thing exists in Latvian. "Viņš ir" = "he is", "viņš esot" = "he allegedly is".
Re: Turkish language has a gossip tense
#110I 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.
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).