It is a tense. It’s literally taught as “learned past tense” in Turkish schools. It’s similar to present perfect tense of English.
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
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.
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?
Anyway, I have put a bit more information about this tense up in the discussion.
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.
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).
But it can be explicit in Dutch:
Reed dan ook niet zo hard.
(drove then also not so fast)
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.
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.
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...
I don't think you can take it that literally. The are conditional and subjective verb forms:
"Comería cuando llegaras".
I could imagine something similar happening in Turkish.
Mood describes the relationship of an event to reality.
Why is "present perfect tense" closer to a tense, but "learned past tense" is closer to a mood?
In modern grammar, "present perfect" is not "close to a tense" - it's a combination of present tense and perfect aspect.
+---------+-----------+------------------+
| tense | aspect | traditional name |
+---------+-----------+------------------+
| present | imperfect | present |
+---------+-----------+------------------+
| past | imperfect | imperfect |
+---------+-----------+------------------+
| future | imperfect | future |
+---------+-----------+------------------+
| present | perfect | perfect |
+---------+-----------+------------------+
| past | perfect | pluperfect |
+---------+-----------+------------------+
| future | perfect | future perfect |
+---------+-----------+------------------+
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.
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?
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 :)
Wouldn’t Turkish schools know more what their language’s rules and meaning is better than Hacker News?
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.
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).
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.