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Turkish language has a gossip tense

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Re: Turkish language has a gossip tense

#111

Post by rjh29 »

makmanalp wrote: post #32
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 meani…

It's scarily similar to Japanese in a lot of ways. Both are agglutinative languages.

Re: Turkish language has a gossip tense

#112

Post by mmasu »

rjh29 wrote: post #111
makmanalp wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 meani…

It's scarily similar to Japanese in a lot of ways. Both are agglutinative languages.

yes, when i was living in turkey and started learning turkish this is the thing that most impressed me. High similarity to Korean also.

Re: Turkish language has a gossip tense

#113

Post by franciscop »

rvense wrote: post #68
sedatk wrote: post #42

Earlier 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 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…

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%93m...

Re: Turkish language has a gossip tense

#114

Post by marcellus23 »

rdtsc wrote: post #107
amaccuish wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

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.

Re: Turkish language has a gossip tense

#115

Post by marcellus23 »

sedatk wrote: post #85
rvense wrote: post #68

Earlier 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.

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?

Re: Turkish language has a gossip tense

#116

Post by nachexnachex »

hanifc wrote: post #102
cryptonector wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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"?

Julia habría dormido con Pedro anoche.

As explained, mood is implied. This is a common pattern in news reports, etc., not quite colloquial

Re: Turkish language has a gossip tense

#117

Post by kelseyfrog »

seszett wrote: post #87
k__ wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 Español. ¿Hablas Español? Also, most Germans don't like speaking German with people who don't speak it well. Probably,…

And in French... Tu parles français Tu parles français ? Parles-tu français ? Est-ce-que tu parles français ? 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.

You would tutoyer a stranger?

Re: Turkish language has a gossip tense

#118

Post by user3939382 »

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…

I was recently reading about a native american language with this feature (was is Cherokee?) Pretty cool.

Re: Turkish language has a gossip tense

#119

Post by sedatk »

krick wrote: post #109

As otgers have said, a mood, not a tense. The same thing exists in Latvian. "Viņš ir" = "he is", "viņš esot" = "he allegedly is".

It's a tense. Without it, the verb would be tenseless, in its imperative form:

gel -> come

gelmiş -> he/she/it came. (hearsay)

geldi -> he/she/it came. (factual)

It's not optional either.

Re: Turkish language has a gossip tense

#120

Post by brnt »

mmasu wrote: post #112
rjh29 wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's scarily similar to Japanese in a lot of ways. Both are agglutinative languages.

yes, when i was living in turkey and started learning turkish this is the thing that most impressed me. High similarity to Korean also.

Well, considering where Turkish (Turkic?) comes from, perhaps not a coincidence?
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