5 ms·
It is a tense. It’s literally taught as “learned past tense” in Turkish schools. It’s similar to present perfect tense of English.
by sedatk 2y ago
It 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.
- sedatk 2y agoOk, let me correct my question: Why is "present perfect tense" closer to a tense, but "learned past tense" is closer to a mood?
- yongjik 2y agoIn 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.
- thaumasiotes 2y agoWe 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.
- yongjik 2y agoTo 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.
- amaccuish 2y agoAs 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.
- rvense 2y agoWhat 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turkish_language#Verb_tenses
- sedatk 2y agoSure, 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.
- amaccuish 2y agoWhat "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.
- rdtsc 2y ago> 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?
- marcellus23 2y agoA 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.
- rdtsc 2y ago> 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 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.
- acchow 2y agoI 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).
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]