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Turkish language has a gossip tense

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Re: Turkish language has a gossip tense

#211

Post by justsomehnguy »

egeozcan wrote: post #209
MichaelZuo wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How does Turkish handle addressing something like ‘the police’ in sentence structure? (without using anything similar to ‘the’) e.g. ‘The police force has expanded recently in this city.’

Nothing. "Polis (police), son (latest) zamanlarda (times, at) bu (this) şehirde (city, within) faaliyetlerini (operations) arttırdı (increased)." If I'm talking about a specific police officer, then I'd use "o", which means he/she/it/that. O geldi -> he/she/it/that arrived. O polis geldi -> that police arrived. Ona polis geldi -> police arrived to him/her (his/her place). polis geldi -> the police (has) arrived. O ba…

Ah, yes, many languages do not need to specifically distinguish between 'police' and 'police force'.

Re: Turkish language has a gossip tense

#212

Post by MichaelZuo »

egeozcan wrote: post #209
MichaelZuo wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How does Turkish handle addressing something like ‘the police’ in sentence structure? (without using anything similar to ‘the’) e.g. ‘The police force has expanded recently in this city.’

Nothing. "Polis (police), son (latest) zamanlarda (times, at) bu (this) şehirde (city, within) faaliyetlerini (operations) arttırdı (increased)." If I'm talking about a specific police officer, then I'd use "o", which means he/she/it/that. O geldi -> he/she/it/that arrived. O polis geldi -> that police arrived. Ona polis geldi -> police arrived to him/her (his/her place). polis geldi -> the police (has) arrived. O ba…

How do you differentiate between the abstract concept of police, the concept of police forces as an organizational unit, and the specific police force that exists within a specific city?

Re: Turkish language has a gossip tense

#213

Post by egeozcan »

MichaelZuo wrote: post #212
egeozcan wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nothing. "Polis (police), son (latest) zamanlarda (times, at) bu (this) şehirde (city, within) faaliyetlerini (operations) arttırdı (increased)." If I'm talking about a specific police officer, then I'd use "o", which means he/she/it/that. O geldi -> he/she/it/that arrived. O polis geldi -> that police arrived. Ona polis geldi -> police arrived to him/her (his/her place). polis geldi -> the police (has) arrived. O ba…

How do you differentiate between the abstract concept of police, the concept of police forces as an organizational unit, and the specific police force that exists within a specific city?

If I understood you correctly, you just name them. The default is the concept, and most of the time people do not feel the need to separate some specific police force, because it's apparent from the context. Some specific police force aren't likely to expand their operations in the city.

On the other hand, I think I may also be failing to explain this correctly because we are already at the limits of my English :)

Re: Turkish language has a gossip tense

#214

Post by tukantje »

MichaelZuo wrote: post #189
egeozcan wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Turkish doesn't have article(s) and "the" is usually very confusing when you first start. But then I learned German too...

How does Turkish handle addressing something like ‘the police’ in sentence structure? (without using anything similar to ‘the’) e.g. ‘The police force has expanded recently in this city.’

Turkish, in comparison to English, is a language that is less lexically dense. So in this instance; you don't really need to specify anything; but that also means a lot of sentences _get longer due to said lack of lexical density requiring more words to be used, for clarity's sake and / or heavier reliance on context_. Which follows the cultural lines quite well - Turkish culture is a _high context culture_ whereas English culture is not (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-context_and_low-context_c...).

Re: Turkish language has a gossip tense

#215

Post by brnt »

indigo945 wrote: post #180
brnt wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

This not being a coincidence is the Altaic Family Hypothesis, which posits that Turkic, Mongolic and often also Japonic and/or Korean languages form a superfamily, sharing a common ancestor. The hypothesis is mostly discredited by present-day linguistics.

Is that the only explanation though? Could proximity explain things? It is my private theory that German and Polish having had so much geographic overlap explains some common features, despite being from different families.

Re: Turkish language has a gossip tense

#216

Post by tukantje »

sedatk wrote: post #142
thaumasiotes wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Ok, let me correct my question: Why is "present perfect tense" closer to a tense, but "learned past tense" is closer to a mood?

-mis'li gecmis zaman or "inferential past tense" is "inferential mood" and "past tense".

Essentially old school people categorised tenses out of thin air; and modern linguists define tenses as "time reference",mood as "modality signalling" that is "relationship to the reality / truth" and aspect as "expression of how something extends over time". So aspect doesn't apply here.

So -mis'li gecmis zaman is a tense and a mood. Sometimes.

Sometimes it is something altogether different such as mirativity (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mirativity).

PS: I have to say, I'm surprised your handle in HN isn't @ssg :)

Re: Turkish language has a gossip tense

#217

Post by MichaelZuo »

tukantje wrote: post #214
MichaelZuo wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How does Turkish handle addressing something like ‘the police’ in sentence structure? (without using anything similar to ‘the’) e.g. ‘The police force has expanded recently in this city.’

Turkish, in comparison to English, is a language that is less lexically dense. So in this instance; you don't really need to specify anything; but that also means a lot of sentences _get longer due to said lack of lexical density requiring more words to be used, for clarity's sake and / or heavier reliance on context_. Which follows the cultural lines quite well - Turkish culture is a _high context culture_ whereas E…

The high-context culture would seem to be an adaption to the lower lexical density, if that’s the case?

e.g. to save on space, paper, writing effort, etc…, Turkish writers have to rely on the reader reading in-between the lines to a greater extent than a similar English writer would in a similar position.

And after many generations of writers competing, it simply became the default norm.

Re: Turkish language has a gossip tense

#218

Post by LudwigNagasena »

yongjik wrote: post #202
thaumasiotes wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We can say a little more; in traditional grammar, aspect is not a recognized category. Thus, while it is very clear that Latin has a system of three tenses, two aspects, and three moods (counting imperative), traditional grammar assigns it six "tenses": +---------+-----------+------------------+ | tense | aspect | traditional name | +---------+-----------+------------------+ | present | imperfect | present | +-------…

To nitpick: under modern analysis "future" is not a tense in English: the future verb "will" (or "shall") behaves much more like "can", "may", "must" and so on - they're collectively called modal verbs, i.e., in English future is a mood.

A tense expressed through a modal verb is still a tense.

Re: Turkish language has a gossip tense

#219

Post by MichaelZuo »

egeozcan wrote: post #213
MichaelZuo wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you differentiate between the abstract concept of police, the concept of police forces as an organizational unit, and the specific police force that exists within a specific city?

If I understood you correctly, you just name them. The default is the concept, and most of the time people do not feel the need to separate some specific police force, because it's apparent from the context. Some specific police force aren't likely to expand their operations in the city. On the other hand, I think I may also be failing to explain this correctly because we are already at the limits of my English :)

Thanks, but you don’t need to explain how if you’re unsure.

If you can just write one example in Turkish, of each case, so three total, most readers can probably puzzle it out with enough time using translation tools.

Re: Turkish language has a gossip tense

#220

Post by LudwigNagasena »

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?

Teaching X as a first language, teaching X as a second language and analysing X from the standpoint of linguistics are three different things/jobs/fields.
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