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Turkish language has a gossip tense

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Re: Turkish language has a gossip tense

#121

Post by krick »

sedatk wrote: post #119
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.

No, it doesn't make it a tense. Different moods may have their own form in one or more tenses and it has nothing to do with being "optional" either. To be fair, distinction is a bit artificial, but generally these are defined by their meaning. "Tense" applies to variability in time (past, present, etc), and "mood" applies to variability in reality (factual statement, hearsay, wishful thinking, etc)

Re: Turkish language has a gossip tense

#122

Post by bee_rider »

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 often hear about these fun features of other languages and wonder if it is the case that English is a particularly simple language. Alternatively, maybe these features just sound fun because they are novel to me.

Re: Turkish language has a gossip tense

#123

Post by DougMerritt »

bee_rider wrote: post #122
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 often hear about these fun features of other languages and wonder if it is the case that English is a particularly simple language. Alternatively, maybe these features just sound fun because they are novel to me.

To a first approximation(see note) all natural languages have similar complexity, it just comes out in different parts of the language. Languages with fewer moods make up for it with synonymous constructions that use more words.

(note) linguists argue about this just like they argue about everything else, but it is the safer assumption for non-linguists.

Re: Turkish language has a gossip tense

#124

Post by bee_rider »

DougMerritt wrote: post #123
bee_rider wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I often hear about these fun features of other languages and wonder if it is the case that English is a particularly simple language. Alternatively, maybe these features just sound fun because they are novel to me.

To a first approximation(see note) all natural languages have similar complexity, it just comes out in different parts of the language. Languages with fewer moods make up for it with synonymous constructions that use more words. (note) linguists argue about this just like they argue about everything else, but it is the safer assumption for non-linguists.

I wonder if anybody who’s learned English would be willing to share some bits they found unusual or unique?

Re: Turkish language has a gossip tense

#125

Post by sedatk »

krick wrote: post #121
sedatk wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

No, it doesn't make it a tense. Different moods may have their own form in one or more tenses and it has nothing to do with being "optional" either. To be fair, distinction is a bit artificial, but generally these are defined by their meaning. "Tense" applies to variability in time (past, present, etc), and "mood" applies to variability in reality (factual statement, hearsay, wishful thinking, etc)

Okay, but this causes variability in time? I don't understand. Is there a rule in linguistics that any tense that also has another semantic function can't ever be called a tense? Then, what are these 13,000 Google Scholar articles that refers to an imaginary "Present Perfect Tense" in English? https://scholar.google.com/scholar?lookup=0&q=%22present+per...

Re: Turkish language has a gossip tense

#126

Post by rdtsc »

marcellus23 wrote: post #114
rdtsc wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> So, no, Turkish schoolteachers would not know the linguistics of Turkish better than linguists

Yes they do, because schoolteachers don't each invent their linguistic terminology as they go along in isolation, it's done by some regulatory governing body. Something like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turkish_Language_Association. If anything, that's more centralized and controlled than what our countries have. So then it's not between the word of linguists on HN and some random primary school teacher in Turkey, but between the Turkish linguists deciding about their language and HN linguists.

And I am sure HN linguists think they know all the languages (programming or otherwise) better than anyone else, but somehow I doubt that.

Re: Turkish language has a gossip tense

#127

Post by idlewords »

bee_rider wrote: post #124
DougMerritt wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To a first approximation(see note) all natural languages have similar complexity, it just comes out in different parts of the language. Languages with fewer moods make up for it with synonymous constructions that use more words. (note) linguists argue about this just like they argue about everything else, but it is the safer assumption for non-linguists.

I wonder if anybody who’s learned English would be willing to share some bits they found unusual or unique?

A few things—articles in English (the, a) are subtle as hell and extremely difficult to use correctly if you're not a native speaker.

The way you can verb any noun is super interesting and productive.

And having to memorize the idiomatic different meanings of a billion verb + preposition combinations (take up, take down, take over, take in, take away, take on) is a real treat for learners.

Re: Turkish language has a gossip tense

#128

Post by bee_rider »

idlewords wrote: post #127
bee_rider wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder if anybody who’s learned English would be willing to share some bits they found unusual or unique?

A few things—articles in English (the, a) are subtle as hell and extremely difficult to use correctly if you're not a native speaker. The way you can verb any noun is super interesting and productive. And having to memorize the idiomatic different meanings of a billion verb + preposition combinations (take up, take down, take over, take in, take away, take on) is a real treat for learners.

The takeaway is: take down “take in.”

Re: Turkish language has a gossip tense

#129

Post by krick »

sedatk wrote: post #125
krick wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, it doesn't make it a tense. Different moods may have their own form in one or more tenses and it has nothing to do with being "optional" either. To be fair, distinction is a bit artificial, but generally these are defined by their meaning. "Tense" applies to variability in time (past, present, etc), and "mood" applies to variability in reality (factual statement, hearsay, wishful thinking, etc)

Okay, but this causes variability in time? I don't understand. Is there a rule in linguistics that any tense that also has another semantic function can't ever be called a tense? Then, what are these 13,000 Google Scholar articles that refers to an imaginary "Present Perfect Tense" in English? https://scholar.google.com/scholar?lookup=0&q=%22present+per...

There is no "rule", it's just how these terms are defined and what they are supposed to mean if we are pedantic enough with how we use them.

"Present perfect" is a tense (or, if we are really pedantic, it's a tense and an aspect), because it's about time of action (the process described was happening in the past, but now it's finished, and it has some result). In a sense, this is not even about the language, it's an aspect of reality, except we don't say that all languages have present perfect tense, because in many languages there is no grammatic form to express it. If English had a way to express hearsay grammatically, we could say it has renarrative/inferential mood. Furthermore, these are two kinda independent axis. If English had a grammatic variation for depending on if it's a hearsay only for the present perfect, we'd say it has renarrative mood in present perfect tense, but doesn't have in any other tense (even though, obviously, in real English we can kinda express similar meaning by adding the word "allegedly" to any tense, but there's no grammatic variation, so we say english doesn't have such mood, but then, one can argue that the same can be said about the word "have", so the line is a bit blurry).

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tense%E2%80%93aspect%E2%80%93m...

Re: Turkish language has a gossip tense

#130

Post by sedatk »

krick wrote: post #129
sedatk wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Okay, but this causes variability in time? I don't understand. Is there a rule in linguistics that any tense that also has another semantic function can't ever be called a tense? Then, what are these 13,000 Google Scholar articles that refers to an imaginary "Present Perfect Tense" in English? https://scholar.google.com/scholar?lookup=0&q=%22present+per...

There is no "rule", it's just how these terms are defined and what they are supposed to mean if we are pedantic enough with how we use them. "Present perfect" is a tense (or, if we are really pedantic, it's a tense and an aspect), because it's about time of action (the process described was happening in the past, but now it's finished, and it has some result). In a sense, this is not even about the language, it's an…

Thanks, but I still don’t understand why I get the pedantry when I call this a tense, but the founding fathers of English grammar walk scot-free by calling it “present perfect tense” instead of “present tense perfect aspect”? Why is this even a debate with me specifically, I don’t get it :)

It’s obvious that tenses that serve other functions can also be called a tense, and yet keep their supplemental grammatical roles. Why is there a resistance to accept this in my case? :)

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