Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Turkish language has a gossip tense

twitter.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

251–258 of 258 posts

Re: Turkish language has a gossip tense

#251

Post by marcellus23 »

mda wrote: post #250
marcellus23 wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"some" and "the" are not mutually exclusive. If I say there's some cake in the kitchen, that doesn't mean it's not the only cake in the kitchen.

Ok i see that you are being deliberately obtuse. Because by saying some, you meant time aspect was not primary. Which is wrong. Anyway, I have put a bit more information about this tense up in the discussion.

> Because by saying some, you meant time aspect was not primary.

No I didn't and I was not being deliberately obtuse. That's not what "some" means here. Pretend I used no word instead of "some" — it would have had the same meaning. I get the impression from your grammar that you are not a native English speaker. That's fine, but then you may not have a complete grasp on something like this.

Re: Turkish language has a gossip tense

#252

Post by rdtsc »

LudwigNagasena wrote: post #220
rdtsc wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

But we're talking about basic tenses here: https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Turkish/Reported_Past_Tense. This doesn't seem like obscure or scientific etymology tracking etc. And then invariable HN "linguists" pop up and say "actually, dear Turkish people, this is not a tense, it's a mood, you're all wrong it turns out".

Re: Turkish language has a gossip tense

#253

Post by LudwigNagasena »

rdtsc wrote: post #252
LudwigNagasena wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

But we're talking about basic tenses here: https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Turkish/Reported_Past_Tense . This doesn't seem like obscure or scientific etymology tracking etc. And then invariable HN "linguists" pop up and say "actually, dear Turkish people, this is not a tense, it's a mood, you're all wrong it turns out".

It’s a sort of “ackchyually” distinction. In colloquial speech “tense” may refer to any grammatical form of a verb that implies a tense, even though the form may also express aspect and mood. In linguistics, as in any other academic field, people usually try to be more precise (https://wals.info/chapter/s7).

Studying linguistics is already confusing because the boundaries between morphology, syntax, semantics and pragmatics are not so clear in the first place, so getting rid of any ambiguity is important to linguists, but those things aren’t important to people who simply study the language to speak it.

Re: Turkish language has a gossip tense

#254

Post by farmeroy »

ted_bunny wrote: post #163
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…

You found Turkish grammar easy compared to french? What was your first language? It was really nice to not have to mess with too much of a case system, after Russian.

My first language is English. It's not that I found the grammar is 'easy' in the sense of being simple, but rather that it is extremely regular, I'm not sure there are even _any_ irregular conjugations. Once you learn a pattern, it is easy to apply it, and because the language is agglutinative, you can really build a lot from some basic root words, which I find fascinating. Actually, when I then learned German, I was able to lean on all cases I learned in Turkish since we usually don't think in terms of genitive, accusative, and dative in English

Re: Turkish language has a gossip tense

#255

Post by mda »

marcellus23 wrote: post #251
mda wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ok i see that you are being deliberately obtuse. Because by saying some, you meant time aspect was not primary. Which is wrong. Anyway, I have put a bit more information about this tense up in the discussion.

> Because by saying some, you meant time aspect was not primary. No I didn't and I was not being deliberately obtuse. That's not what "some" means here. Pretend I used no word instead of "some" — it would have had the same meaning. I get the impression from your grammar that you are not a native English speaker. That's fine, but then you may not have a complete grasp on something like this.

If you remove "some" and change it to mean that it is the "only" thing that conveys temporal information how does your initial argument hold? It is a tense, and all grammar books I have and see agrees that it is a tense. I am not a native speaker but I understand enough, but I get the impression that you are not a native Turkish speaker, That's fine, but then you may not have a complete grasp on something like this

Re: Turkish language has a gossip tense

#256

Post by marcellus23 »

mda wrote: post #255
marcellus23 wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Because by saying some, you meant time aspect was not primary. No I didn't and I was not being deliberately obtuse. That's not what "some" means here. Pretend I used no word instead of "some" — it would have had the same meaning. I get the impression from your grammar that you are not a native English speaker. That's fine, but then you may not have a complete grasp on something like this.

If you remove "some" and change it to mean that it is the "only" thing that conveys temporal information how does your initial argument hold? It is a tense, and all grammar books I have and see agrees that it is a tense. I am not a native speaker but I understand enough, but I get the impression that you are not a native Turkish speaker, That's fine, but then you may not have a complete grasp on something like this

> If you remove "some" and change it to mean that it is the "only" thing that conveys temporal information

That wouldn't be changing the meaning. I'm not continuing this conversation because 1) I don't want to argue about the subtleties of English grammar with someone who is not a native speaker, and 2) I don't want to argue about linguistics with someone who doesn't know linguistics (as proven by your pointing to "grammar books" for evidence that it's a tense).

Re: Turkish language has a gossip tense

#257

Post by mda »

marcellus23 wrote: post #251
mda wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ok i see that you are being deliberately obtuse. Because by saying some, you meant time aspect was not primary. Which is wrong. Anyway, I have put a bit more information about this tense up in the discussion.

> Because by saying some, you meant time aspect was not primary. No I didn't and I was not being deliberately obtuse. That's not what "some" means here. Pretend I used no word instead of "some" — it would have had the same meaning. I get the impression from your grammar that you are not a native English speaker. That's fine, but then you may not have a complete grasp on something like this.

(HN doesn't want me to continue with this nonsense deeper, so adding here). Just to note, it is not only grammar books, there are several papers about it as well, you could see it if you actually bothered understanding the nuances of it. So I am wondering are you an expert in linguistics and Turkic languages? Do you have a real source that supports your thesis? My guess is you are not, so indeed there is no need for further discussion.

Re: Turkish language has a gossip tense

#258

Post by tukantje »

MichaelZuo wrote: post #217
tukantje wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Hypothetically it could be; but it is anyone’s guess frankly.

Most likely it is multi variate in the end; as it is quite a broad thing.

Post reply on HN