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Comment by idlewords | Hacker News Reader

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.

View on HN

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

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.

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”.

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.

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...

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.

(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."

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.

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

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.

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