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Turkish language has a gossip tense

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Re: Turkish language has a gossip tense

#131

Post by BiteCode_dev »

psychoslave wrote: post #34
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.

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

BS (Baliverne Saugrenue)!

La tournure correcte, "voudrait" n'est en pratique que très peu utilisée pour le témoignage indirect au quotidien.

"Il paraît qu'on a voulu te faire croire que ce genre de phrase n'est employée que dans des œuvres littéraires et télévisuelles" est beaucoup plus réaliste.

Indicatif + participe passé, ou imparfait. Le conditionnel est surtout utilisé pour l'hypothétique non lié aux ragots et encore, par des gens comme dans ce thread qui se soucient de leur language.

Par contre, au journal de 20h: "on dit dans les milieux autorisés qu'un accord secret aurait été signé" est tout à fait courant.

Re: Turkish language has a gossip tense

#132

Post by BiteCode_dev »

cryptonector wrote: post #66
psychoslave wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

"On diraît" est utilisé par les enfants de 6 ans pour parler de jouer un rôle, mais pas vraiment par les adultes pour reporter un commérage.

Re: Turkish language has a gossip tense

#133

Post by anticensor »

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…

Turkish native speaker here. -miş is indeed a tense (can be used as a base tense in the indicative past, or as a compound tense to add nonevidentiality in any other verb form).

Re: Turkish language has a gossip tense

#134

Post by cryptonector »

nachexnachex wrote: post #116
hanifc wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Yeah, it's very common in news because it's a very concise way to indicate the possibility of doubt because it's just "gossip" (as the title here would have it).

Re: Turkish language has a gossip tense

#135

Post by amoss »

marcellus23 wrote: post #115
sedatk wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

"Keep at it!", "Hold the line!" appear to be orders to be doing something right now.

Re: Turkish language has a gossip tense

#136

Post by anticensor »

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…

Yeah, morphologically two dimensional, but semantically 1.5: 17 or so tense-aspect-mood combinations make sense, fewer than 25 the underlying morphology would suggest.

Re: Turkish language has a gossip tense

#137

Post by anticensor »

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…

Turkish doesn't have articles, I think you meant determiner adjectives there.

Re: Turkish language has a gossip tense

#138

Post by sedatk »

mplewis wrote: post #104
sedatk wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

It is a tense. It can simultaneously function as a mood, that doesn't change its tense status. It changes the time aspect of a verb. I don't know how more tense you can be than that.

Re: Turkish language has a gossip tense

#139

Post by sedatk »

marcellus23 wrote: post #115
sedatk wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

I didn't say it doesn't act as a mood. I'm saying that it acts as a tense, and therefore I can name it as such, as how grammar forefathers named "present perfect tense" in English despite all the objections from HN about "perfect" being an aspect. :)

Re: Turkish language has a gossip tense

#140

Post by sedatk »

mplewis wrote: post #103
sedatk wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

Why isn't it the case with the use of the term "present perfect tense" in English then, despite "perfect" being an aspect, not even a tense? How is present perfect closer to a tense, but this one closer to a mood? What's the difference?
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