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Turkish language has a gossip tense

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Re: Turkish language has a gossip tense

#221

Post by marcellus23 »

sedatk wrote: post #139
marcellus23 wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. :)

You can call anything whatever you want, that doesn't make it correct.

Re: Turkish language has a gossip tense

#222

Post by marcellus23 »

mda wrote: post #155
marcellus23 wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

It coveys "the" temporal information in the sentence and it is always past. E.g. A children's story only contains this nothing else.

Imperative also conveys "the" temporal information in the clause and it is always past.

Re: Turkish language has a gossip tense

#223

Post by darkhorn »

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)

Thank you for your English/Latvian centric language perspective but there are lots of different tenses in different languages. They are not tought as moods. All are tenses.

You can read Turkish or Bulgarian grammer books. They all are tenses. There is no such thing as mood.

Re: Turkish language has a gossip tense

#224

Post by thaumasiotes »

LudwigNagasena wrote: post #218
yongjik wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Linguistics does draw the distinction between syntactic "tense" and semantic "time", but in that case English modal verbs wouldn't reflect "moods" at all, just "modality". They're all periphrastic. The same goes for perfect aspect, also periphrastic in English, though I don't know offhand how (or whether!) there is a terminological difference between syntactically-marked aspect and semantically-present aspect.

The same objection would theoretically apply to voice, where the English passive voice must be periphrastic too, but in that case everyone agrees that this is a distinction of voice and the difference between inflection (where grammatical meaning is expressed by changing the form of a single word) and periphrasis (where grammatical meaning is expressed by combining multiple words) isn't relevant. This is just an inconsistency in modern theory, which probably arose because voice isn't relevant to semantics at all.

Ignoring the modal auxiliaries, English would still have moods, subjunctive ("We demand that Robert be ejected from the book club") and irrealis ("If Robert were to be ejected from the book club, ..."), but neither of those is in a particularly robust state in the modern language.

Re: Turkish language has a gossip tense

#225

Post by ilayn »

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,…

You are thinking in western grouping of tenses on a verb conjugation of a different language. It is not the mood that is not inferred here. It is the property of the verb. Verb itself can be used to communicate the same information with a single word "Gitmisim" just as valid ("I apparently went there"). So where is the tense of a single word if it does not have tense in it? How do turkish people communicate without a tense using a single word just with the mood?

Re: Turkish language has a gossip tense

#226

Post by foobarian »

techcode wrote: post #199
foobarian wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

The ones that susprised me were more common things: kutija, čelik, sat, čoban, boja, budala, sanduk, pare...

Hah, of course wiki has a pretty good list with even more: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Serbo-Croatian_words_o...

Re: Turkish language has a gossip tense

#227

Post by bmm6o »

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.

Not only all the phrasal verbs, but that there is no parallelism across usage. Take up, take down, take off versus break up, break down, break off. Knowing the meaning of some of those doesn't really shed light on the meaning of any others.

Re: Turkish language has a gossip tense

#228

Post by LudwigNagasena »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #224
LudwigNagasena wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Linguistics does draw the distinction between syntactic "tense" and semantic "time", but in that case English modal verbs wouldn't reflect "moods" at all, just "modality". They're all periphrastic. The same goes for perfect aspect, also periphrastic in English, though I don't know offhand how (or whether!) there is a terminological difference between syntactically-marked aspect and semantically-present aspect. The sa…

Inflectional constructions express tense through morphology and periphrastic constructions express tense through syntax. Together they constitute expressions of grammatical tense.

Re: Turkish language has a gossip tense

#229

Post by bloppe »

sedatk wrote: post #138
mplewis wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I don't speak Turkish. How would you distinguish e.g. "I heard he went" (inferential past) vs. "I heard he will go" (inferential future)? Is there such a distinction?

Re: Turkish language has a gossip tense

#230

Post by bloppe »

brnt wrote: post #215
indigo945 wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

German and Polish share a common ancestor.
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