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.
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?]
> 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.
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.
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?
Irony notice. This comment contains irony.
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
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).
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.
But it can be explicit in Dutch:
Reed dan ook niet zo hard.
(drove then also not so fast)
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.
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.
(note) linguists argue about this just like they argue about everything else, but it is the safer assumption for non-linguists.
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.
For the benefit of other folks wanting to follow up the "take off" thing: it's called a "phrasal verb".
After she said it, I realized the incredible subtlety in communication that can be expressed by the position/omission of key articles.
"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.
e.g. ‘The police force has expanded recently in this city.’
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.
Most likely it is multi variate in the end; as it is quite a broad thing.
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.
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 :)
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.
> 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.)
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.
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).
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.
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)
[1] https://www.espressoenglish.net/order-of-adjectives-in-engli... [2] https://assets.cambridge.org/97811076/99892/frontmatter/9781...
Modern Chinese uses "tingshuo" 聽說 (听说) https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E8%81%BD%E8%AA%AA
Internet uses IIRC? ;)
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 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.)
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."
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.
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 :-)
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 "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.
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
Hah, of course wiki has a pretty good list with even more: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Serbo-Croatian_words_o...
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.
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
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.
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...
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
I've had situations in France where I ended up having one side of the conversation in French and one in English!
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 :)
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
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...
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).
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=fmNl4gcufBU&pp=ygU0RXNraSBrYXl...
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. :)
It was really nice to not have to mess with too much of a case system, after Russian.
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?
Vs
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.
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.
Don't know where this prejudice comes from.
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.
Ze zouden met elkaar naar bed zijn geweest.
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.
As explained, mood is implied. This is a common pattern in news reports, etc., not quite colloquial
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.
"O gelmiş" - "He/she (allegedly) came. "O gelmişmiş" " He/she (allegedly) came(but its bs).
Turkish has some evidentiality.
gel -> come
gelmiş -> he/she/it came. (hearsay)
geldi -> he/she/it came. (factual)
It's not optional either.
"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...
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? :)
You can read Turkish or Bulgarian grammer books. They all are tenses. There is no such thing as mood.
(so you can view the thread without a login)
* 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).
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".
But interestingly no distinct words for grandfathers, both grandfathers are called "dede" (so no "babababa" or "annebaba")
- 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
Because of this tense, I often find myself prefixing my sentences with "as far as I have heard".
O gozümden öldumek?
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.
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.
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".
https://www.reddit.com/r/turkish/comments/1dgkxme/does_turki...
language is fascinating.
This one is literally called "past tense with 'miş'". Example: 'demişler' > 'they supposedly said'.
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 :)
("History is a bunch of lies upon which we all agree")
So thats where Trump gets his "like a dog" comparison he loves to whip out
+ 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