Turkish language has a gossip tense | Hacker News Reader

Turkish language has a gossip tense

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276 pointssedatk255 comments

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 other languages have a more fun arsenal.

Turkish also has an imprecative mood, specifically for wishing ill on third parties: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imprecative_mood

On the other hand, a mood for well-wishing occurs in Sanskrit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benedictive [EDIT: and Quenya? https://eldamo.org/content/words/word-1905928135.html ]

On the gripping hand, AAVE actually has a richer tense-aspect-mood inventory than Standard American English: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/African-American_Vernacular_En...

[now I wonder what language Galadriel's ring speech was supposed to have been in, and whether it had a commissive mood?]

> Imprecative retorts in English

> While not a mood in English, expressions like like hell it is or the fuck you are are imprecative retorts. These consist of an expletive + a personal pronoun subject + an auxiliary verb.

There's a similar quasi-mood in colloquial Finnish, humorously called "aggressive": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aggressive_mood

This was a fun and informative comment, thank you for sharing.

No wuckers

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.

Right, because "present" is the tense here and "perfect" the aspect.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Present_perfect

Ok, how is that different than "learned"/"reported" being the aspect and "past" being the tense in Turkish?

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?

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.

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.

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

> 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?

-mis'li gecmis zaman or "inferential past tense" is "inferential mood" and "past tense".

Essentially old school people categorised tenses out of thin air; and modern linguists define tenses as "time reference",mood as "modality signalling" that is "relationship to the reality / truth" and aspect as "expression of how something extends over time". So aspect doesn't apply here.

So -mis'li gecmis zaman is a tense and a mood. Sometimes.

Sometimes it is something altogether different such as mirativity (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mirativity).

PS: I have to say, I'm surprised your handle in HN isn't @ssg :)

As the other commenter said, perfect is the aspect, so the internal structure of an event, very important e.g. in Slavic languages. Your confusion leaves the door open to doubt on your actual knowledge of linguistics.

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 "is" or "is not", the question is how clear does your description end up. (And as always, when you argue about whether or not something is an X, you're not so much talking about the thing as you're talking about the definition of the category X.)

I studied Middle Eastern languages (though mostly Arabic and Persian) and linguistics at a university in northern Europe, and we would treat tense, aspect, and mood as different categories. Often they are distinct and verbs are conjugated both for time and e.g. evidentiality and thus it is fruitful to have two categories. I think this is the case for Turkish, e.g. see how Wikipedia lists the conjugations[0] here as a two-dimensional system. The article uses the term tense (explicitly 'for simplicity'), but I think it makes sense to have different names for the different categories - so tense would refer to the rows in that schema, and mood would refer to the columns.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turkish_language#Verb_tenses

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.

The inferential mood (your "gossip tense") is more related to mood (signals a particular relationship to truth or reality) than tense (signifies a relationship to time).

Why isn't it the case with the use of the term "present perfect tense" in English then, despite "perfect" being an aspect, not even a tense? How is present perfect closer to a tense, but this one closer to a mood? What's the difference?

Well, "present perfect" would refer to a specific construction that has both tense (vs. past perfect) and aspect (vs. present continuous).

But as per my other comment, if you're just listing all the constructions an English word can take for your students to memorise, you can just call them all tenses and be done with it.

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, along with tense and aspect, can you explain why you think this meets the definition of a tense and not a mood?

"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.

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.

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. :)

It really depends on whether you take the term tense to refer to a semantic category or just a set of constructions (surface forms).

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

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.

I said "the" because you said "it conveys 'some' temporal information".

"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.

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).

(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.

"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)

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?

I'm not entirely following your argument. If your point is that it's a "single word", that doesn't really matter. That's just because Turkish is a synthetic language (uses morphology to convey info instead of separate words). Latin is famously a synthetic language and it still has concepts of mood, tense, and aspect.

Frankly, you don't have to take my word for it. I suggest doing some research on how mood and tense work in linguistics. It's not clear to me that you understand what these terms actually mean. Maybe I'm wrong.

I think you are also giving yourself too much credit on the separability of tense and mood and if it does not fit into your mental model you are discarding all other options. You can do the same research yourself. Mood and tense are not always separable as you might think. Morphology is a red herring here. It clearly transmits the essential time information and also adds mood no-confirm structure on top. Hence if you don't consider that as a tense, then I have the same suspicion about your knowledge and obviously I might be also wrong.

I am not suggesting that you cannot convey both mood and tense information with the same pattern. I agree with that, and I already made that point in my English imperative example. I also agree that moods can restrict which tenses you can express, sometimes restricting it to only one possible tense (as with Turkish inferential).

The point I am making, is that by the definition of mood, "inferential" simply has to be a mood. The point of using it is to suggest a particular relationship with reality ("I didn't see this, but I heard it second-hand"). That's modality, i.e. mood. It also happens to restrict the temporality of the verb to the past.

> It clearly transmits the essential time information and also adds mood no-confirm structure on top.

What you seem to be referring to here is the actual vocal pattern that you attach to a verb root to signify gossip. Of course, word endings can convey both tense and mood, just as they can convey both gender and number. But they are still separate concepts.

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...

English "Tense" is also derived from "tempus"!

> 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".

Same in Turkish, we call them "eylemin zamanları" which stands for "times of verbs".

Yeah, morphologically two dimensional, but semantically 1.5: 17 or so tense-aspect-mood combinations make sense, fewer than 25 the underlying morphology would suggest.

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

What "Turkish schools" call it is irrelevant, it adds "colour" to an event. Just because the events happen to be in the past, does not make the Inferential Mood a tense. An event can be in the past but factual.

> 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?

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 chemist.

> 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 then it's not between the word of linguists on HN and some random primary school teacher in Turkey, but between the Turkish linguists deciding about their language and HN linguists.

And I am sure HN linguists think they know all the languages (programming or otherwise) better than anyone else, but somehow I doubt that.

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).

Nobody knows anything better than HN, ever.

Exactly, right? "We'll create a fast paced start-up to help Turkish people understand their own language". You gotta admire both the boldness and stupidity at the same time!

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.

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? ;)

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

> English is pretty low on moods

English is fairly low on inflection. It's not low on moods; one of the more important syntactic categories is the modal auxiliary verbs.

I was recently reading about a native american language with this feature (was is Cherokee?) Pretty cool.

I often hear about these fun features of other languages and wonder if it is the case that English is a particularly simple language. Alternatively, maybe these features just sound fun because they are novel to me.

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?

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.

The takeaway is: take down “take in.”

> 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)

Articles exist in Romance languages, that’s true, but they are subtly different. You usually wouldn’t say “the Tuesday” in English but you would often say “el martes” in Spanish; “tennis” vs “el tenis”; “I don’t have a car” vs “no tengo coche” and so on.

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...

How does Turkish handle addressing something like ‘the police’ in sentence structure? (without using anything similar to ‘the’)

e.g. ‘The police force has expanded recently in this city.’

‘Police force has expanded recently in this city.’

Nothing. "Polis (police), son (latest) zamanlarda (times, at) bu (this) şehirde (city, within) faaliyetlerini (operations) arttırdı (increased)."

If I'm talking about a specific police officer, then I'd use "o", which means he/she/it/that.

O geldi -> he/she/it/that arrived.

O polis geldi -> that police arrived.

Ona polis geldi -> police arrived to him/her (his/her place).

polis geldi -> the police (has) arrived.

O bahsettiğin polis geldi -> The police officer you were talking about (has) arrived.

Ah, yes, many languages do not need to specifically distinguish between 'police' and 'police force'.

How do you differentiate between the abstract concept of police, the concept of police forces as an organizational unit, and the specific police force that exists within a specific city?

If I understood you correctly, you just name them. The default is the concept, and most of the time people do not feel the need to separate some specific police force, because it's apparent from the context. Some specific police force aren't likely to expand their operations in the city.

On the other hand, I think I may also be failing to explain this correctly because we are already at the limits of my English :)

Thanks, but you don’t need to explain how if you’re unsure.

If you can just write one example in Turkish, of each case, so three total, most readers can probably puzzle it out with enough time using translation tools.

Abstract Concept of Police (e.g., law enforcement in general):

> Polis, toplumun güvenliğini sağlamakla görevlidir.

> (Police are responsible for maintaining public safety.)

Police Force as an Organizational Unit:

> Bu şehirdeki polis teşkilatı faaliyetlerini arttırdı.

> (The police force in this city has expanded its operations.)

Specific Police Force Within a Specific City:

> İstanbul polisi son zamanlarda çok aktif.

> (The Istanbul police have been very active lately.)

> Bu şehirdeki polis teşkilatı faaliyetlerini arttırdı.

Interestingly the -ki suffix here was borrowed from Persian (another Indo-European language like English), and effectively highlights a unique instance - "the one which" - in a way that Turkish otherwise doesn't specifically do.

No, the Persian ki is the conjunction (Polis teşkilatı faaliyetlerini arttırdı ki, hırsızlık azalsın), not the possessive suffix (-ki).

Sources: Me being a native speaker and also: Turkish Grammar (Oxford 2nd ed. 2001), Geoffrey Lewis. Pages 69 and 211 (Just checked to be sure).

(Note: not a Turkish speaker, but the other language without the articles)

You don't need most of the time because it's evident from the context without any ambiguity.

You also need to know what English is quite lacking in the declension and inflection departments which do the heavy lifting in the other languages and often eliminate the need for a separate article words.

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 English culture is not (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-context_and_low-context_c...).

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.

Five different "the"s, three different "of"s, two different "from"s, six different "a"s.

I have an ESL colleague (who speaks fantastic English) and she has repeatedly asked me to spellcheck important documents because she is concerned she will "mess up the articles".

After she said it, I realized the incredible subtlety in communication that can be expressed by the position/omission of key articles.

I've always been taught that "the" is for when there's a single obvious instance you're talking about. There are many policemen and women, but if I say "the police" there's only really one likely candidate which I could be talking about.

"A man" is just some guy. If I say "The man" there's a specific guy I'm talking about and I expect you to know which one.

Did you know dutch has two words for "the"? One is generally for big or important things and the other for small or unimportant things. I'm sure people trying to learn Dutch love figuring out which you use when.

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.

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.

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...

Turkish native speaker here. -miş is indeed a tense (can be used as a base tense in the indicative past, or as a compound tense to add nonevidentiality in any other verb form).

It’s cool that you’re a native speaker, but the typical HN commenter is at a much higher level of proficiency than that.

Irony notice. This comment contains irony.

You should have used the ironic mood if you'd wanted us to understand the irony

IMHO, it would be more correct-miş, in terms of linguistics at least, to call it an “aspect” than a “tense”.

In "bad moods", "Halim yok" is more often used as "I'm worn-out".

In "good moods", is more often used as "I'm on game, winning" or "I'm on fire" Others are about good mood in different tenses etc.

In Bulgarian there is "double inferential" mood, used to relate reported speech about the speaker.

Usually used when the speaker got drunk and has no memory of the thing they did. a.k.a. "past forgotten" tense. The double inferential also reflects the fact that the witness account maybe inaccurate/exaggerated either because the witness(es) were themselves drunk or because they knew the speaker cannot dispute their account.

The most extreme form is when the speaker doesn't even remember getting drunk ("Бил съм се бил напил.) and/or getting in a fight ("Бил съм се бил бил.").

The extra pun comes from "fought" and "was" being spelled and pronounced the same.

It also rhymes.

That’s so interesting and also kind of crazy. Do these forms of speech come with their own verb conjugations and so on, making them difficult for people who learn the language as a non-native speaker? What about young children, do they understand it?

Yes, it does.

Is the purpose only when getting drunk and did it arise out of an alcohol culture? (If so, why doesn’t British English have more tenses)

I often joke that Polish has several singulars and several plurals, because you know, 1-2 beers is singular, 3-4 is just tipsy, 4-6 is a real drink, but 4-24 is a real plural. But after 25+, you don’t remember so might as well restart from 0. But it’s a joke, because it applies to other things than beer.

So, do they use that tense for ministers/news reporting, or in jokes, or when a program reports errors from the user?

I guess it's also used when one (usually disapprovingly) tells a story/accusation about themselves from a third party's perspective.

Well it has an implied tense, it refers to the past by itself. It is possible to combine it with a tense, for example the future tense to report that someone said they will do something in the future

My native language (Sinhalese) has this too. One just adds the suffix "-loo" to the end of any sentence and it becomes hearsay.

Same in Kannada, a South Indian language. You prefix "-ante" (roughly, _it is said_) and you can disown everything you say.

(Not directed at the parent comment but the thread in general)

I don't know why people are more interested in labeling it than explaining it. (Although admittedly, they go side by side.)

Every grammatical aspect of "past time with -miş" (which is how I learned it) is the same as the other one, "past time with -di". As in, I cannot think of a sentence where replacing one suffix with the other would result in a syntax error, or any semantic difference other than certainty.

A point of confusion might be verbs made into adjectives using -miş, although I'm having a hard time coming up with many examples where there's an ambiguity between the adjective and the "tense". Doesn't help that the assertive(?) case is without suffix, so "pişmiş" might mean "[it is] [a] cooked [one]" or "[Apparently it was] cooked".

Another point of parallelism between the two past "tenses" is that it's perfectly valid to answer a question in one with the other. (Or is this a general language or tense thing? Hmm.)

That's a Turkish&Bulgarian thing, many other languages with inferentials have inferentials with aorist aspect, not ones with preterite aspect.

I am not sure I agree. The suffix -miş (and 4 other similar forms because of vowel harmony) is first and foremost indicative of time (the past). Yes there is the mood aspect, but time aspect, IMO, is primary.

From the book "Turkish, a Comprehensive Grammar": The markers of past tense in Turkish are the verbal suffixes -DI and -mIş and the copular marker -(y)DI. "the past copula -(y)DI expresses past tense in absolute terms; that is, it locates a situation in a time prior to the moment of speech. -mIş, by contrast, is a marker of relative past tense."

Robert Underhills "Turkish Grammar" calls it Narrative past tense.

Geoffrey Lewis "Turkish Grammar" writes "the mis-past is exclusively a past tense" " miş-past. This base is formed by adding -miş to the stem: gelmiş, görmüş, almış, bulmuş. Two distinct functions are combined in it."

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 horrible turkish, and are almost always impressed by any level of effort. This is in terrible contrast to french or german, where not only does the grammar or spelling horrify, but people are almost unwilling to understand your pitiful efforts :(

I feel your pain!

I'm considering learning either Turkish or Arabic, for fun (as phonetically-spelled non-Indoeuropean languages), do you have a comparison with Arabic? I know exactly what you mean re French and German...

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 one day with some Xinjiang people as well :D

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.

Also many Iranians speak 'Turk' and understand Turkish from watching Turkish telenovelas on satellite TV.

Good point! Although, what they call 'Turk' is actually Azeri :) (Part of the historical Azerbaijan is in Iran.)

How very interesting, I understand Turkish and Farsi are totally unrelated (Turkic and Indo-European language families).

More than half of the Iranian population belong to an ethnic minority, and the biggest by far is the Turkish speaking one, the Azeri - it's something like 1/3 of the population as far as I remember. I don't know if non-Azeri learn Turkish from TV, but for a lot of Iranians it's simply their first language.

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. :)

For the speakers of European languages it is usually quite difficult to learn to pronounce correctly some of the sounds of Arabic. Turkish does not have any sounds hard to pronounce for Europeans.

The Indo-European languages and the Afro-Asiatic, including the Semitic languages like Arabic, are distinguished from most languages of the world by having much more irregular grammars, of the kind that was traditionally named "inflected".

Amazingly, while the more irregular grammars of the "inflected" languages are better seen as a bug and not as a feature, in the past the European scholars believed that such grammars are a sign of superiority of the Indo-European and Semitic languages, even if it is much easier to argue in favor of an opposite point of view.

In conclusion, I believe that for a speaker of European languages it is much easier to learn Turkish, due to easier pronunciation and more regular grammar.

Nevertheless, when there is no special reason for learning either of the languages, Modern Standard Arabic or Classical Arabic are more interesting languages from a historical point of view, enabling the understanding of many facts about the old Arabic literature or pertaining to the related Semitic languages that have been very important in the Ancient World or about the origins of the Greek and Latin alphabets (Standard Arabic has a conservative phonology and it still distinguishes most of the sounds for which the oldest Semitic alphabet has been created, which has later evolved into the simplified Phoenician alphabet, from which the Greek, Aramaic and Hebrew alphabets have been derived).

It would probably be fun to read some original mathematical texts in arabic if you could. I would say that since modern turkish didn't come into being until the founding of the republic, you really do lose the historical context. I would love to learn ottoman turkish one day...

Actually there is no such thing as Ottoman Turkish, it is still Turkish with heavily borrowed phrases. It is not a distinct language. You won’t have any hard time understanding the spoken Turkish in Anatolia of that time. So called Ottoman Turkish was mostly limited to the government and literature use. Here is a recording of “Ottoman Turkish” from that time.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=fmNl4gcufBU&pp=ygU0RXNraSBrYXl...

I'm too out of practice to really engage at this level. But actually, I meant I would like to learn the Ottoman Turkish of government and literature. I obviously can't go back in time and converse with the Anatolian turks and if I could, I might prefer to also have some Greek and Armenian in my toolbox...

I took three years of Arabic as an undergrad, it's an interesting language to study, but needing to learn the alphabet will make it more difficult than Turkish, I would say. Which might be fine if you're looking for a challenge!

All other things being equal, I didn't feel up to the task of learning a language that regularly omits all vowels in written form. But man, that calligraphy...

"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!

Getting out of the big cities tends to help. Or even just out of the tourist area. The last time I went to Nice, for example, I found it hilarious that within Carre d'Or, people would switch to English when I showed the slightest hesitation with my French, or the first time I made an error (so, quickly). But just a few steps into Liberation, minutes walk away, we kept coming across shop staff that kept speaking French no matter what horrible crimes I committed against their language...

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 :)

> one side of the conversation in French and one in English!

This is actually an effective way for two people to practise each others' language, and is adjustable according to aptitudes:

Easy mode: each person speaks their own L1

Hard mode: each person speaks the other's L1

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 learning French and German, regardless how bad it might feel like during initial efforts, eventually it will improve good enough to work on those languages.

> 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...

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

Yes we do, but there's a bit of nuance to it. Most Dutch people will happily oblige to speak slowly (within reason) if you preface any conversation with a quick "I'm trying to learn Dutch properly", and will appreciate the effort.

Knowing the language will definitely help people fit in better as many conversations amongst the Dutch will still be in Dutch and also most signage and other written texts will obviously also be in Dutch.

Yeah, the difference in France if you try vs. don't try can be dramatic. My first school trip to France with my French class, one of the girls in my class tried asking for something in a small shop in Paris in English. The entire shop went quiet, until she tried again in French whereon they immediately spoke English to her.

Conversely, I went into a small shop, tried my broken French, and asked the shopkeeper if he spoke English after a failed attempt at making him understand me. He didn't, but dragged me into the street and started stopping random people until he found someone who could help translate.

While purely anecdotal, those extremes seem fairly common even today, and frankly I get it - it'd annoy me to if people don't even make a perfunctory attempt. Of course the stereotype of certain types of tourists doesn't help.

Apart from that, I think people in general are far more likely to feel ok about trying to express themselves in your language if you've made a fool of yourself in their language first...

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 meaning is clear. You can often omit articles because the suffixes mirror them. It's also a phonetic language - there's no "sounds different at the end of the word" etc.

It's really the perfect language to pick up on a visit even ... except the vocabulary doesn't resemble anything that most of the rest of the world speaks. There's lots of loanwords from farsi, arabic, french and english of course but beyond that and speakers of other Turkic languages, it's struggle for most people.

But yes, it's true that we're often over the moon that someone put in the effort to speak it :-)

It's scarily similar to Japanese in a lot of ways. Both are agglutinative languages.

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?

indeed; but still incredible that it retained so many characteristics over time and at such great distance from origin! I had been very fascinated with this.

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.

It is something that can be said for any two languages ;)

One could say all sorts of things, sure, but that's neither here nor there. German and Polish have an identifiable common ancestor. I'd be surprised to learn of any grammatical similarities between the two that aren't also found in other IE languages.

I don't know to what extent this has happened with German and Polish. They are, of course, (somewhat distant) cousins in any case, both being Indo-European languages.

But it is often the case that geographically close languages influence each other -- the term in linguistics is "sprachbund". If one is entirely honest, a lot of languages have taken vocabulary or grammatical features from one or more languages from other language families, rendering the entire idea of a language "family" (the word is here evoked to imply a pure genetic lineage) kind of suspect to begin with. But it still is how linguistics is commonly done today.

The basis for my very non-scientific observation is that I am a native Dutch speaker, who's conversational in German and has a Polish partner. German fits quite well in between Polish and Dutch in terms of features: Dutch has few, Polish has nearly all, and German has quite a few more than Dutch ;) Similarities between Dutch and German are more easily understood since they've a recent ancestor, but for Polish and German we must go back much further. Yet, my untrained eyes see a sort of continuity that seems to cross the language-family barrier, which could make sense because of that shared geography of German and Polish. I know that Poles have a history of fervent conversationalism that favors (grammatic) complexity, so perhaps it's a hobby that spilled over to German-speakers. Or vice versa (I know less of German cultural history).

Turkish doesn't have articles, I think you meant determiner adjectives there.

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.

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 there can completely alter the meaning of words, leading to trope situations where the foreigner says something embarrassing and all the native speakers laugh.

It’s even worse for Cantonese, at least from what I noticed when travelling in HK. Where speakers are pretty much forced to shout out every single word when there’s any background noise whatsoever. (or get very close to their interlocutor’s ears, practically lips touching earlobes)

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...

> budala

:-)

Désolé, nous avons nous même été élevé dans une démarche visant à systématiquement développer un sentiment de culpabilité pour chaque écart à la sacrocainte norme langagière promu par une bande de réactionnaires sans compétences linguistiques qui se prennent pour les défenseurs de la langue dont ils fommentent la sclérose.

As a German speaker, I understand those issues.

I currently learn Spanish, and I'm always amused by how regular everything is.

In German, words constantly get split up and change positions in the sentences when you say something slightly different.

Du sprichst Deutsch.

Sprichst du Deutsch?

Hablas Español.

¿Hablas Español?

Also, most Germans don't like speaking German with people who don't speak it well. Probably, because subtle errors can change the whole meaning.

For most Germans it's easier to speak English with foreigners who speak better English than German.

Yeah it took me until B2 or so before I could get any Germans to really engage with me in German. My son grew up there and his German was quite good while we lived there, and even when I reached C1 he was perpetually ashamed of my accent and all of my grammatical errors. Of course, now that it's been some time since we've lived there my German has only gotten worse and he suffers even more when I try to practice

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.

You would tutoyer a stranger?

It depends on the context and the age of the stranger. If it's at work (some random sysadmin or dev at a client, say) yes I would, in the street I wouldn't. In Québec it's more common to tutoyer strangers than in Europe, too.

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

It is called evidentiality. It doesn't have any direct relationship to time, as one would expect with a tense. Southern Quechua has a reported event evidential affix as well. A friend who is a speaker of Quechua was once horrified, hearing that a man was going to be given a life sentence for murder in Bolivia. They played a portion of his confession over the radio, and the accused man used the reported event evidential through the entirety. Literally, saying that all his words were second hand, dubious information. To my friend, the implication was that he was saying what the police had told him to say. Apparently, those judging the case were not aware of the subtlety, and it did not come through in the Spanish translation of the confession, resulting in a conviction. Whatever the facts of the case were in the end, what is interesting is that for Quechua speakers like my friend, due to the use of the reported event evidential, there was no confession, even though all of the events of a murder were stated in the first person.

It is a tense in Turkish though.

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?

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 wonderfully the brain works.

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.

Il paraît que quelqu'un voudrait faire croire que ce genre de phrase n'est employé que dans des œuvres littéraires et télévisuelles. :)

Ce quoi on dirait n'est pas vrai du tout.

"On diraît" est utilisé par les enfants de 6 ans pour parler de jouer un rôle, mais pas vraiment par les adultes pour reporter un commérage.

BS (Baliverne Saugrenue)!

La tournure correcte, "voudrait" n'est en pratique que très peu utilisée pour le témoignage indirect au quotidien.

"Il paraît qu'on a voulu te faire croire que ce genre de phrase n'est employée que dans des œuvres littéraires et télévisuelles" est beaucoup plus réaliste.

Indicatif + participe passé, ou imparfait. Le conditionnel est surtout utilisé pour l'hypothétique non lié aux ragots et encore, par des gens comme dans ce thread qui se soucient de leur language.

Par contre, au journal de 20h: "on dit dans les milieux autorisés qu'un accord secret aurait été signé" est tout à fait courant.

French learner here: I read that as "Julie would have slept with Pierre yesterday." I take it there's some mood subtlety I'm missing?

What you say is grammatically correct. But if you want to find out whether it implies gossip or past conditional, you need to look at the context.

Context. Or even the lack thereof. In this case the use of the conditional implies an unstated condition, the "if I'm right about it" condition.

This is more idiomatic than grammatical. It's the same in Spanish. In English we don't have this sort of idiom, so that phrase doesn't translate very well.

How would that be phrased in Spanish? Are you talking about the future tense in constructions like "Será que...?" or "Estará volviendo" to say "he must be returning"?

Julia habría dormido con Pedro anoche.

As explained, mood is implied. This is a common pattern in news reports, etc., not quite colloquial

Yeah, it's very common in news because it's a very concise way to indicate the possibility of doubt because it's just "gossip" (as the title here would have it).

Yes we do, “…will have slept…”

Merci.

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.

Yeah! Turkish is a very agglutinative language, much more than languages like English or French. This makes Turkish richly packed with meaning but also very complex.

French has four base tenses and four compounding aspects.

You can also exaggrate/repeat it to convey that you don't actually believe it.

"O gelmiş" - "He/she (allegedly) came. "O gelmişmiş" " He/she (allegedly) came(but its bs).

Something like this occurs cross-linguistically: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evidentiality

Turkish has some evidentiality.

Isn't this also how the subjunctive is used in German? News reports usually are in Konjuntiv I as a form of indirect speech.

As otgers have said, a mood, not a tense. The same thing exists in Latvian. "Viņš ir" = "he is", "viņš esot" = "he allegedly is".

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)

Okay, but this causes variability in time? I don't understand. Is there a rule in linguistics that any tense that also has another semantic function can't ever be called a tense? Then, what are these 13,000 Google Scholar articles that refers to an imaginary "Present Perfect Tense" in English? https://scholar.google.com/scholar?lookup=0&q=%22present+per...

There is no "rule", it's just how these terms are defined and what they are supposed to mean if we are pedantic enough with how we use them.

"Present perfect" is a tense (or, if we are really pedantic, it's a tense and an aspect), because it's about time of action (the process described was happening in the past, but now it's finished, and it has some result). In a sense, this is not even about the language, it's an aspect of reality, except we don't say that all languages have present perfect tense, because in many languages there is no grammatic form to express it. If English had a way to express hearsay grammatically, we could say it has renarrative/inferential mood. Furthermore, these are two kinda independent axis. If English had a grammatic variation for depending on if it's a hearsay only for the present perfect, we'd say it has renarrative mood in present perfect tense, but doesn't have in any other tense (even though, obviously, in real English we can kinda express similar meaning by adding the word "allegedly" to any tense, but there's no grammatic variation, so we say english doesn't have such mood, but then, one can argue that the same can be said about the word "have", so the line is a bit blurry).

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tense%E2%80%93aspect%E2%80%93m...

Thanks, but I still don’t understand why I get the pedantry when I call this a tense, but the founding fathers of English grammar walk scot-free by calling it “present perfect tense” instead of “present tense perfect aspect”? Why is this even a debate with me specifically, I don’t get it :)

It’s obvious that tenses that serve other functions can also be called a tense, and yet keep their supplemental grammatical roles. Why is there a resistance to accept this in my case? :)

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.

https://nitter.poast.org/esesci/status/1843769276471349698

(so you can view the thread without a login)

This tense is the easiest way to understand if someone's first language is Turkish. Even my Turkish friends who are born in Turkey misses this if they learned the language in school, e.g., Laz friends.

I know very little about speaking Turkish but one interesting thing I learned recently is there's a different word for aunt and uncle depending on if it's your mom or dad's side.

Slavic languages do that too

I think that might be quite common. In Swedish we have morbror/farbror (literally mother-brother/father-brother) and moster/faster (mother's sister/father's sister). It's similar for grandparents.

Turkish also has distinct words for grandmothers that works in a similar way. Father is baba, mother is anne and for grandmothers we have "babaanne" "anneanne" (generally pronounced & shortened as "babane" and "anane")

But interestingly no distinct words for grandfathers, both grandfathers are called "dede" (so no "babababa" or "annebaba")

In Chinese the terms will also distinguish whether the brother/sister is older or younger than your parent is.

Bengali does that too and even allows for age based relative positioning by using a "prefix" + "relationship_name":

    - Father's side:
        Uncle:
            Older than father (age_position_prefix + Jethu):
                1. Eldest:    Boro Jethu
                2. After him: Mejo Jethu
                3. After him: Sejo Jethu
                4. After him: Chhoto Jethu
            Younger than father (age_position_prefix + Kaaku):
                5. Eldest:    Boro Kaaku
                6. After him: Mejo Kaaku
                7. After him: Sejo Kaaku
                8. After him: Chhoto Kaaku
        Aunt:
            Same age_position_prefix as above but common suffix: Pishi

    - Mother's side:
        Uncle:
            Same age_position_prefix as that on the father's side but common suffix: Maama
        Aunt:
            Same age_position_prefix as that on the father's side but common suffix: Maashi

     Boro means eldest
     Mejo means middle
     Sejo means younger than the middle
     Chhoto means youngest

So men on the father's side have more dedicated words than others.

There is even a dedicated word in Turkish to describe the relationship between the husbands of sisters :)

Bengali has it too: Bhairabhai (Bhai = brother so the Bhaira prefix qualifies the brotherly nature of the relationship)

I like to think that has to do with how strong family and 'extended' family ties are, relative to English speaking countries. When you spend soo much time with relatives you need more distinction. Theres even different words for the various forms of 'in-laws', sister-in-law, spouse of sister-in-law, etc.

Theres a lot of "onto" mapping, things converging when translated, in both directions.

Conversely as a counterexample, the turkish word kalmak, which is to stay, is used broadly in many instances where in English the most correct translation would use verbs such as "to remain", "to be left", in addition to the most straightforward "to stay".

Many languages have more kin terms than English, which is especially poor in this sense. In Turkish, as you comment, we have:

* Aunt (father’s side) - hala

* Aunt (mother’s side) - teyze

* Uncle (father’s side) - amca

* Uncle (mother’s side) - dayi

You use teyze to refer to an unknown older woman and amca to an unknown older men (similar to how “uncle” is used in Mandarin).

With this more explicit vocabulary, interesting things can be expressed succinctly that would be cumbersome in English (see Sapir-Whorf :-), eg boys take after their dayi and girls after their hala or that as a general consensus you like your teyze better than your hala.

We also have terms for older sister (abla) and older brother (abi).

Bulgarian has even more of these.. like whether one believes/trusts in what sh/e is (quoting of) being said (by someone else), and the like - "Dubitative" forms..

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bulgarian_verbs

It does indeed. And the author of this post is the founder of EksiSozluk. Hi Sedat. :)

Because of this tense, I often find myself prefixing my sentences with "as far as I have heard".

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.

What tense do they use in news or something you're fairly certain is fact but you didn't witness it yourself?

Wikipedia states that they use the "normal" (not inferential/gossip) mood, because otherwise it could be taken as a value judgement in some contexts.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inferential_mood

You still use this tense if you are just reporting what you heard on news. What matters is that you have not witnessed it, just talking about what you heard on news. “There was an accident.” “Kaza olmuş” (the alleged gossip tense).

If you want to emphasize something matter of factly, you might use the normal past tense (kaza oldu) but that might imply you seen it yourself, you you might get asked if you were actually there.

In something like a history book, past events usually mentioned by a combination of this reported speech and past tense of the “do” verb: “Kaza olmuştur”

To sum up, it is not specifically a gossip tense. If you were not there, even if you are certain, you use reported version.

Its also very important to slowly yell in this tense, when giving a public speech to more than 10 people. It doesn't matter if there is a mic or not, the words must carry with the wind and strike the hearts of all who hear it.

In the news they use "known past tense", like "gel-di". The article above mentiones "learned past tense", like "gel-miş".

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

The closest equivalent in English is scare quotes. Works in spoken contexts too, just do finger quotes and change intonation a bit.

You can use quotes neutrally: John says "the nuclear waste is totally safe".

Or you can use them to cast subtle shade: John says the nuclear waste is "totally safe".

This reddit thread casts better light on it.

https://www.reddit.com/r/turkish/comments/1dgkxme/does_turki...

this is an “irrealis mood”, there are quite a few of them with different functions, see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irrealis_mood

language is fascinating.

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/-mi%C5%9F#Turkish

There is past tense, with 'di' 'diler' postfix. Example: 'dediler' > 'they said'

This one is literally called "past tense with 'miş'". Example: 'demişler' > 'they supposedly said'.

It's not a tense. It's called evidentiality.

Whether it’s a tense or not is both mentioned in the thread, and discussed here on this HN post under two or three threads now. How did you manage to miss all that? :)

For first time I hear it as "gossip tense". Actually it is "a tense that you did not witness yourself" or officially "learned past tense".

Yes, I coined the term myself (as I mention it later in the thread) because I thought it explained its function better. This was the thread that I first used it: https://x.com/esesci/status/1666152424564719639

Now that I looked for it, others apparently came up with the same name for it before me. I think, that only validates its how apt it is :)

It's called past inferential in linguistic terms (all non-past inferentials in Turkish are compound tenses, but the past inferential is a base tense).

or so you've heard

Is this similar to -대요 endings in Korean used for indirect quotation?

It is not gossip tense. There is no such name in Turkish grammar.

Can we get this applied to print, broadcast and cable news programs?

Ironically, it's not used in journalistic contexts in Turkish. It would seem amateurish if it were, like they weren't doing their jobs properly.

But it is in Azerbaijani (they also tend to makeshift the non finite verb suffix -ub as the perfective).

> “L'histoire est une suite de mensonges sur lesquels on est d'accord.” —NB

("History is a bunch of lies upon which we all agree")

So is this HN post gossip about the gossip tense?

Is it an adverb? Possibly ?

> Geber-esi! die.like.a.dog-impr.3sg "May he die like a dog!"

So thats where Trump gets his "like a dog" comparison he loves to whip out

What is the minimum set of grammar for which all other grammar in a language can be constructed? So if Turkish has a gossip tense then we know we can construct that tense from English right? I'm thinking in terms of conlangs but not just binary.

So does English, https://www.ef.edu/english-resources/english-grammar/tense-c...

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.

Verb tense is distinct from conjugation (and semantics are a whole different matter altogether). Careful consideration doesnt make trending tweets.

Also, it's not optional. Unless you use "gossip tense" or explicitly state that it's hearsay, it must be factual. There's no ambiguity unlike English.

No, you are misunderstanding if you think that is a "gossip tense".

English has subtle forms of grammaticalized evidentiality, but not in verb conjugations. https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/english-language-and...

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