Turkish language has a gossip tense • Hacker News Board

Re: Turkish language has a gossip tense

#191

Post by MichaelZuo » Sun, Oct 13, 2024, 3:09 PM UTC

foobarian wrote: post #188

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…

Going the other way around, coming from a Slavic language I was really surprised at how many Turkish words we have. I didn't realize this until watching the show Diriliş: Ertuğrul, and doing a double take every other line. "Why are there so many Serbo-Croat words in there???" The "error tolerance" you mention is interesting, especially in contrast with Mandarin. My understanding is that messing up the intonation ther…

It’s even worse for Cantonese, at least from what I noticed when travelling in HK. Where speakers are pretty much forced to shout out every single word when there’s any background noise whatsoever. (or get very close to their interlocutor’s ears, practically lips touching earlobes)

Re: Turkish language has a gossip tense

#192

Post by thwg » Sun, Oct 13, 2024, 3:09 PM UTC

anticensor wrote: post #133

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).

IMHO, it would be more correct-miş, in terms of linguistics at least, to call it an “aspect” than a “tense”.

Re: Turkish language has a gossip tense

#193

Post by 3eb7988a1663 » Sun, Oct 13, 2024, 3:11 PM UTC

mjd wrote: post #170

idlewords wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

My Korean tutor said the same thing about “the”. I said “doesn't it just mean there is only one instance?" and he replied "the police". For the benefit of other folks wanting to follow up the "take off" thing: it's called a "phrasal verb".

I have an ESL colleague (who speaks fantastic English) and she has repeatedly asked me to spellcheck important documents because she is concerned she will "mess up the articles".

After she said it, I realized the incredible subtlety in communication that can be expressed by the position/omission of key articles.

Re: Turkish language has a gossip tense

#194

Post by LudwigNagasena » Sun, Oct 13, 2024, 3:16 PM UTC

scrollaway wrote: post #160

idlewords wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> articles in English (the, a) are subtle as hell and extremely difficult to use correctly if you're not a native speaker. Found the Slavic speaker ;) The/A construction is similar in most Latin languages. Absolutely agree on the other two features though. It’s kinda crazy and I have no idea how I actually learned those things… they just “happened” into my head. (I’m not a native speaker)

Articles exist in Romance languages, that’s true, but they are subtly different. You usually wouldn’t say “the Tuesday” in English but you would often say “el martes” in Spanish; “tennis” vs “el tenis”; “I don’t have a car” vs “no tengo coche” and so on.

Re: Turkish language has a gossip tense

#195

Post by noisy_boy » Sun, Oct 13, 2024, 3:18 PM UTC

thaumasiotes wrote: post #108

depressedpanda wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Bengali does that too and even allows for age based relative positioning by using a "prefix" + "relationship_name":

    - Father's side:
        Uncle:
            Older than father (age_position_prefix + Jethu):
                1. Eldest:    Boro Jethu
                2. After him: Mejo Jethu
                3. After him: Sejo Jethu
                4. After him: Chhoto Jethu
            Younger than father (age_position_prefix + Kaaku):
                5. Eldest:    Boro Kaaku
                6. After him: Mejo Kaaku
                7. After him: Sejo Kaaku
                8. After him: Chhoto Kaaku
        Aunt:
            Same age_position_prefix as above but common suffix: Pishi

    - Mother's side:
        Uncle:
            Same age_position_prefix as that on the father's side but common suffix: Maama
        Aunt:
            Same age_position_prefix as that on the father's side but common suffix: Maashi

     Boro means eldest
     Mejo means middle
     Sejo means younger than the middle
     Chhoto means youngest

So men on the father's side have more dedicated words than others.

Re: Turkish language has a gossip tense

#196

Post by noisy_boy » Sun, Oct 13, 2024, 3:23 PM UTC

sedatk wrote: post #90

nickjj wrote: post #86

I 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.

There is even a dedicated word in Turkish to describe the relationship between the husbands of sisters :)

Bengali has it too: Bhairabhai (Bhai = brother so the Bhaira prefix qualifies the brotherly nature of the relationship)

Re: Turkish language has a gossip tense

#197

Post by nsenifty » Sun, Oct 13, 2024, 3:53 PM UTC

hliyan wrote: post #185

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…

My native language (Sinhalese) has this too. One just adds the suffix "-loo" to the end of any sentence and it becomes hearsay.

Same in Kannada, a South Indian language. You prefix "-ante" (roughly, _it is said_) and you can disown everything you say.

Re: Turkish language has a gossip tense

#198

Post by sedatk » Sun, Oct 13, 2024, 3:57 PM UTC

thwg wrote: post #190

It's not a tense . It's called evidentiality.

Whether it’s a tense or not is both mentioned in the thread, and discussed here on this HN post under two or three threads now. How did you manage to miss all that? :)

Re: Turkish language has a gossip tense

#199

Post by techcode » Sun, Oct 13, 2024, 4:19 PM UTC

foobarian wrote: post #188

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…

Going the other way around, coming from a Slavic language I was really surprised at how many Turkish words we have. I didn't realize this until watching the show Diriliş: Ertuğrul, and doing a double take every other line. "Why are there so many Serbo-Croat words in there???" The "error tolerance" you mention is interesting, especially in contrast with Mandarin. My understanding is that messing up the intonation ther…

AFAIK very few "Serbo-Croatian" words got adopted by Turkish/Ottoman - I only know of "kraljica".

On the other hand - during ~500 years (within last ~625 years) that Ottomans occupied most of Balkans - many words stuck around to this day.

For example: Jok, Jorgan, Džezva, Mašala ...etc

Re: Turkish language has a gossip tense

#200

Post by jfengel » Sun, Oct 13, 2024, 4:40 PM UTC

cryptonector wrote: post #67

jfengel wrote: post #36

Earlier 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.

Merci.