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Turkish language has a gossip tense

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Re: Turkish language has a gossip tense

#171

Post by egeozcan »

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…

But "-miş" denotes something happening in the past, in gossip form, on its own. It's trickier than what that table shows IMHO.

Re: Turkish language has a gossip tense

#173

Post by egeozcan »

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".

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

Re: Turkish language has a gossip tense

#174

Post by egeozcan »

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…

A tourist who can speak a few sentences in Turkish could get a lot of free stuff in small shops when I used to live in Istanbul. My "cute" French didn't have the same effect in Paris though.

Re: Turkish language has a gossip tense

#175

Post by ruuda »

bee_rider wrote: post #124
DougMerritt wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To a first approximation(see note) all natural languages have similar complexity, it just comes out in different parts of the language. Languages with fewer moods make up for it with synonymous constructions that use more words. (note) linguists argue about this just like they argue about everything else, but it is the safer assumption for non-linguists.

I wonder if anybody who’s learned English would be willing to share some bits they found unusual or unique?

Pronunciation bears little relation to how words are written. For the longest time I thought I knew how to pronounce Greenwich, because I knew how to pronounce ‘green’ and ‘sandwich’. (Or things like advertising vs. advertisement, etc.) I saw a joke somewhere that western people think Chinese must be difficult because you have to memorize the pronunciation of so many symbols, but English is no different.

Re: Turkish language has a gossip tense

#176

Post by spongebobism »

bee_rider wrote: post #124
DougMerritt wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To a first approximation(see note) all natural languages have similar complexity, it just comes out in different parts of the language. Languages with fewer moods make up for it with synonymous constructions that use more words. (note) linguists argue about this just like they argue about everything else, but it is the safer assumption for non-linguists.

I wonder if anybody who’s learned English would be willing to share some bits they found unusual or unique?

idlewords mentioned some good ones. While English doesn't have many moods, it still has relatively many verb forms (just take a look at past tenses: I ate, I've eaten, I had eaten, I was eating, I have been eating, I had been eating...). In most contexts, only one of them is idiomatic, and knowing which one takes a lot of studying. Also, English has a fixed order for adjectives [1]. AFAIK, this is unusual cross-linguistically - at least in my native language, "big red ball" and "red big ball" would both be idiomatic. If you're really curious, you can take a look at the contents of an English grammar for advanced learners. What gets a lot of chapters, probably trips up a lot of learners. [2]

[1] https://www.espressoenglish.net/order-of-adjectives-in-engli... [2] https://assets.cambridge.org/97811076/99892/frontmatter/9781...

Re: Turkish language has a gossip tense

#177

Post by mesutpiskin »

There are two past tense forms in Turkish, both of which have been used since the Old Turkish period. Our suffixes for the witnessed past tense are "-dI / -dU." This suffix is explained as the witnessed past tense because the action occurred in front of the speaker's eyes in the past. Our suffixes for the inferential past tense are "-mIş / -mUş." These suffixes express that the action took place at an unseen time in the past. In today's written language, only "-mIş / -mUş" suffixes are used as the inferential past tense markers.

ref: https://turkishstudies.net/DergiTamDetay.aspx?ID=14135

Re: Turkish language has a gossip tense

#178

Post by diggan »

pjmlp wrote: post #50
petesergeant wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> there is the cultural issue of speaking directly in English versus trying a very basic "Parlez vous Anglais?" as initial question In my experience in the Netherlands you should definitely just start speaking English to people, as asking someone if they speak English is a bit like asking if they can read

As mentioned, it is a cultural thing.

Very much so. We get a lot of tourists where I live (Spain) yet consistently the only tourists that come here and assume we speak their language (yes) are people speaking French. Everyone else seems to ask if I speak English before engaging, or they try to speak Spanish directly, while French-speaking people just start speaking French with you, seemingly assuming you also speak French, even though we're both in Spain...

Re: Turkish language has a gossip tense

#179

Post by diggan »

k__ wrote: post #95
seszett wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And in French... Tu parles français Tu parles français ? Parles-tu français ? Est-ce-que tu parles français ? I guess it's the best of both worlds. The French like to hear foreigners speak French though, they're just terrible at understanding accents they don't hear often and terrible at adjusting their speech so the other person understands them. And too self conscious about their English accent to speak English.

I only heard bad things about the French and their language, but I never met a unfriendly french person. Don't know where this prejudice comes from.

I'm assuming you've been to France and particularly Paris? I wouldn't say every French person is unfriendly, but my anecdotal evidence seems to point to there being a higher rate of unfriendly people (towards tourists perhaps) in France (mostly in the south of France + Paris twice), compared to other places I've visited as a tourist.

Re: Turkish language has a gossip tense

#180

Post by indigo945 »

brnt wrote: post #120
mmasu wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

yes, when i was living in turkey and started learning turkish this is the thing that most impressed me. High similarity to Korean also.

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.
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