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Turkish language has a gossip tense

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Re: Turkish language has a gossip tense

#51

Post by dhruvrajvanshi »

jcul wrote: post #28
readthenotes1 wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"This is in terrible contrast to french " I guess I got lucky in France then because they felt so sorry for me after my attempts at french they would reply in english

That's kind of the problem though, if you are trying to learn and people just switch to English it's difficult to make progress. I've had situations in France where I ended up having one side of the conversation in French and one in English!

It's a tricky situation as a language learner. On the one hand, you've got to be polite, trying to converse with people in their native language, on the other, you don't want to waste their time just for your own language learning goals.

I live in Germany and I always start conversations in German, but if it becomes clear that their English is much better than my German, I switch to English to spare them of the burden. It's not the barista's job to indulge me in my learning pursuits :)

Re: Turkish language has a gossip tense

#52

Post by yongjik »

sedatk wrote: post #42
idlewords wrote: post #8

This is not a tense but a grammatical mood, it's called the inferential mood. A bunch of languages have it to distinguish eyewitness accounts from reported speech. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inferential_mood Verb tense has to do with an action's relationship to time, mood expresses the speaker's relationship and attitude to the action. English is pretty low on moods (indicative, imperative, subjunctive), while oth…

It is a tense. It’s literally taught as “learned past tense” in Turkish schools. It’s similar to present perfect tense of English.

In English, school-taught grammar is often wildly different from modern linguists' view. For example, while traditional English grammar has no less than 12 tenses, linguists consider it to only have two tenses: past or present. The remaining differences don't really behave like tense.

I could imagine something similar happening in Turkish.

Re: Turkish language has a gossip tense

#53

Post by namaria »

brudgers wrote: post #15
namaria wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not the same thing. Reporting speech by saying 'subject said (...) [past tense verb] (...)' is not specific to English and doesn't carry the same nuance as the tweet implies this Turkish 'gossip' tense carries.

Different languages convey nuance with different mechanics. The only reason an English speaker would say "He said he would be at the airport" is to convey nuance. + He said he would be at the airport + He said he would be at the airport + He said he would be at the airport + He said he would be at the airport

Fair enough, but the interesting tidbit is that in Turkish you can add a verb ending that implies reportedness and that's interesting in itself and not present in English.

Re: Turkish language has a gossip tense

#54

Post by Scarblac »

petesergeant wrote: post #37
pjmlp wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone that has lived in French and German speaking countries and nowadays speaks both fluently, I would assert usually in French speaking countries there is the cultural issue of speaking directly in English versus trying a very basic "Parlez vous Anglais?" as initial question. Whereas in German speaking countries I only had any issues in reaching out to technicians for house repairs. However if we insist learni…

> 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

Yes, we much prefer speaking English over having to endure slow, broken Dutch.

Re: Turkish language has a gossip tense

#55

Post by Scarblac »

BiteCode_dev wrote: post #33
_9y71 wrote: post #24

I learned French because I moved to another country, and I was learning verb conjugations by regularly looking at the (very long) conjugation table. One day I just randomly looked at the table of verb conjugations in my mother tongue, Turkish, and I couldn't believe it, it's many times longer than the one in French! The fact that there are so many things I use in daily life without much effort has shown me how wonder…

Note that French does have a tense for gossip. You can say: julie aurait couché avec pierre hier, meaning julie allegedly selpt with pierre yesterday. But it's not a cultural thing to use it outside of tv or books.

Now that you say this, the exact same thing is used in Dutch to indicate something is a rumour.

Ze zouden met elkaar naar bed zijn geweest.

Re: Turkish language has a gossip tense

#56

Post by contingencies »

keybored wrote: post #46
idlewords wrote: post #8

This is not a tense but a grammatical mood, it's called the inferential mood. A bunch of languages have it to distinguish eyewitness accounts from reported speech. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inferential_mood Verb tense has to do with an action's relationship to time, mood expresses the speaker's relationship and attitude to the action. English is pretty low on moods (indicative, imperative, subjunctive), while oth…

Apparently a lot of Buddhist texts start (in English) with “So it has been told to me”.

IIRC in Buddhism not lying is emphasised as one aspect of 'right speech', other requirements being those such as non-divisiveness, etc. https://www.accesstoinsight.org/ptf/dhamma/sacca/sacca4/samm... There is also a record of Buddha discussing the value of ideas based upon personal experience rather than blindly accepting them from others. https://www.dhammatalks.org/suttas/AN/AN3_66.html

Modern Chinese uses "tingshuo" 聽說 (听说) https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E8%81%BD%E8%AA%AA

Internet uses IIRC? ;)

Re: Turkish language has a gossip tense

#57

Post by sedatk »

yongjik wrote: post #52
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.

In English, school-taught grammar is often wildly different from modern linguists' view. For example, while traditional English grammar has no less than 12 tenses, linguists consider it to only have two tenses: past or present. The remaining differences don't really behave like tense. I could imagine something similar happening in Turkish.

Let me put it this way: it's not less of a tense than present perfect tense in English. They signify the time in a similar way.

Re: Turkish language has a gossip tense

#58

Post by mtalantikite »

keybored wrote: post #46
idlewords wrote: post #8

This is not a tense but a grammatical mood, it's called the inferential mood. A bunch of languages have it to distinguish eyewitness accounts from reported speech. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inferential_mood Verb tense has to do with an action's relationship to time, mood expresses the speaker's relationship and attitude to the action. English is pretty low on moods (indicative, imperative, subjunctive), while oth…

Apparently a lot of Buddhist texts start (in English) with “So it has been told to me”.

Or also: “Thus have I heard”. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thus_have_I_heard

Re: Turkish language has a gossip tense

#59

Post by fakedang »

geoka9 wrote: post #21
farmeroy wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know any Arabic unfortunately. They are completely different language families with only slight overlap in vocabulary, but beyond that I can't make a comparison. I would say it probably depends on what your language learning goals are, but turkish is super fun to learn and speak, and its super fun to travel in turkey or just to hang out in istanbul. You might also surprise yourself speaking turkish in China o…

To add, knowledge of Turkish will also make it easier to converse in Azerbaijan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan and a bunch of other countries in the region.

To add to that, I learnt to basic-speak the now extinct language of Chagatai, because I know Turkish.

Turkish is also mutually intelligible with Uzbek and Kazakh - it's basically like English and Dutch.

Edit:- Learning Chagatai practically let's you speak Kazakh and Uzbek partway. Tried it in both countries, might work in other places like Kyrgyzstan and Turkmenistan too. :)

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