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Turkish language has a gossip tense

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Re: Turkish language has a gossip tense

#151

Post by sedatk »

tetris11 wrote: post #98
dkural wrote: post #92

It is also used to indicate surprise. "Sular gitmis!". "Bu yemek cok aci olmus!" - heard right after taking a bite :)

How would you say: he allegedly died in front of me. O gozümden öldumek?

“Gözümün önünde ölmüş” (“o” is implied) but in that case it means a later realization of the death because the you missed that when he was dying.

That might happen, for example, when you’re in a train, and you think the person in front of you is sleeping. At some point you realize that he’s dead and then you might form a sentence like that.

If you had witnessed the person dying when he was dying, not as an after the fact realization, then you’d say “gözümün önünde öldü”. Because you knew he was dying when it was happening.

Re: Turkish language has a gossip tense

#152

Post by acchow »

rdtsc wrote: post #126
marcellus23 wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 the…

I think you are both right but are talking about different things.

In elementary school in Canada, I was taught phonetics to help learn sounding words out. This was absolutely a government-sanctioned curriculum. I was taught that the sounds are categorized as either consonants or vowels. Every English speaker can confirm that of course this is correct.

But then you major in linguistics and discover that the elementary school definition of consonants and vowels is actually not quite right. And you can’t even categorize certain sounds well (such as the “w” in “we”, which is actually pronounced with a mostly open vocal tract).

Re: Turkish language has a gossip tense

#153

Post by thaumasiotes »

yongjik wrote: post #146
sedatk wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

In school grammar, "present perfect" is a tense. School grammars are basically tradition, so you can call it whatever you want as long as you agree with long-dead grammarians. Ditto for Turkish - I'm sure it has its own dead grammarians. In modern grammar, "present perfect" is not "close to a tense" - it's a combination of present tense and perfect aspect.

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      |
    +---------+-----------+------------------+
    |   past  | imperfect |    imperfect     |
    +---------+-----------+------------------+
    |  future | imperfect |     future       |
    +---------+-----------+------------------+
    | present |  perfect  |     perfect      |
    +---------+-----------+------------------+
    |   past  |  perfect  |    pluperfect    |
    +---------+-----------+------------------+
    |  future |  perfect  |  future perfect  |
    +---------+-----------+------------------+
This is the reason for calling perfect a "tense": it's traditional. But this model won't stand up to analysis. Interestingly, the Romans themselves do not seem to have used it; where we refer to "pluperfect tense", they referred to the "past perfect-er tense", identifying both tense and aspect (admittedly, both under the name "tense", or rather "time"). I don't know when the conceptual distinction was lost.

Re: Turkish language has a gossip tense

#154

Post by amoss »

mkl wrote: post #150
amoss wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

They're orders to continue a present activity into the future.

Is the continuation not an activity in the present time, or that starts in the present time? Characterizing this as being in the futures seems to be an incorrect boundary case.

Re: Turkish language has a gossip tense

#155

Post by mda »

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,…

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

Re: Turkish language has a gossip tense

#156

Post by akvadrako »

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,…

"Don't do that" can refer to the past, though it's unnatural to use a past tense verb.

But it can be explicit in Dutch:

Reed dan ook niet zo hard.

(drove then also not so fast)

Re: Turkish language has a gossip tense

#157

Post by the_gipsy »

franciscop wrote: post #113
rvense wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It's very funny as a Spaniard since "verbal tense" in Spanish is literally "verbal time" (tiempo(s) verbal), so it's unequivocally not able to describe things that are not temporal: https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiempo_verbal Even more interestingly, that article links in English to the TAM (Tense-Aspect-Mood): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tense%E2%80%93aspect%E2%80%93m...

> unequivocally not able to describe things that are not temporal

I don't think you can take it that literally. The are conditional and subjective verb forms:

"Comería cuando llegaras".

Re: Turkish language has a gossip tense

#158

Post by mkl »

amoss wrote: post #154
mkl wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're orders to continue a present activity into the future.

Is the continuation not an activity in the present time, or that starts in the present time? Characterizing this as being in the futures seems to be an incorrect boundary case.

They're definitely orders about the future. "Keep at it" has the present as context, "hold the line" is a bit ambiguous, "don't let it happen again" has the past as context, but they're all talking about the future.

Re: Turkish language has a gossip tense

#159

Post by thaumasiotes »

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?

> Why is "present perfect tense" closer to a tense, but "learned past tense" is closer to a mood?

Are you thinking of these as exclusive categories? Every finite verb has a tense and a mood. That's the point of having separate terms; these are independent dimensions of the verb.

Theoretically, there could also be a "reported present" verb form, except that this is semantically impossible: any event that has been reported to you must have happened before the report did, and the report must have happened before you started talking about it, so reported events are stuck in the past.

It's possible, though, to imagine someone making a statement about reported information in the future, in which case the event would take place before the report, but possibly after I describe how I'm imagining the future. Would anything interesting happen in Turkish for this kind of sentence?

Re: Turkish language has a gossip tense

#160

Post by scrollaway »

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.

> 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)

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