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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 spee
by idlewords 2y ago
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 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.
- mda 2y agoI 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."
- aebtebeten 2y agoTurkish also has an imprecative mood, specifically for wishing ill on third parties: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imprecative_mood 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benedictive [EDIT: and Quenya? https://eldamo.org/content/words/word-1905928135.html 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_English#Tense_and_aspect 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?]
- shawndrost 2y ago> 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.
- Sharlin 2y agoThere's a similar quasi-mood in colloquial Finnish, humorously called "aggressive": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aggressive_mood https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aggressive_mood
- appplication 2y agoThis was a fun and informative comment, thank you for sharing.
- 082349872349872 2y agoNo wuckers
- sedatk 2y agoIt is a tense. It’s literally taught as “learned past tense” in Turkish schools. It’s similar to present perfect tense of English.
- yongjik 2y agoIn 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.
- sedatk 2y agoLet 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.
- hashmush 2y agoRight, because "present" is the tense here and "perfect" the aspect. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Present_perfect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Present_perfect
- sedatk 2y agoOk, how is that different than "learned"/"reported" being the aspect and "past" being the tense in Turkish?
- thaumasiotes 2y agoBecause "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.
- keybored 2y agoApparently a lot of Buddhist texts start (in English) with “So it has been told to me”.
- contingencies 2y agoIIRC 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/samma-vaca/index.html 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 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 https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E8%81%BD%E8%AA%AA Internet uses IIRC? ;)
- mtalantikite 2y agoOr also: “Thus have I heard”. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thus_have_I_heard https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thus_have_I_heard
- thaumasiotes 2y ago> 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.
- user3939382 2y agoI was recently reading about a native american language with this feature (was is Cherokee?) Pretty cool.
- bee_rider 2y agoI 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.
- DougMerritt 2y agoTo 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.
- bee_rider 2y agoI wonder if anybody who’s learned English would be willing to share some bits they found unusual or unique?
- idlewords 2y agoA 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.
- bee_rider 2y agoThe takeaway is: take down “take in.”
- scrollaway 2y ago> 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)
- anticensor 2y agoTurkish 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).
- mcnamaratw 2y agoIt’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.
- tarkin2 2y agoYou should have used the ironic mood if you'd wanted us to understand the irony
- thwg 2y agoIMHO, it would be more correct-miş, in terms of linguistics at least, to call it an “aspect” than a “tense”.
- forgot-im-old 2y agoIn "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.
- JBiserkov 2y agoIn 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.
- adriand 2y agoThat’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?
- anticensor 2y agoYes, it does.
- eastbound 2y agoIs 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?
- JBiserkov 2y agoI guess it's also used when one (usually disapprovingly) tells a story/accusation about themselves from a third party's perspective.
- emrah 2y agoWell 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
- hliyan 2y agoMy native language (Sinhalese) has this too. One just adds the suffix "-loo" to the end of any sentence and it becomes hearsay.
- nsenifty 2y agoSame in Kannada, a South Indian language. You prefix "-ante" (roughly, _it is said_) and you can disown everything you say.
- aib 2y ago(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.)
- anticensor 2y agoThat's a Turkish&Bulgarian thing, many other languages with inferentials have inferentials with aorist aspect, not ones with preterite aspect.