4 ms·

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

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.

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 ago
  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.
  - 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 ago
      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).
- mcnamaratw 2y ago
  Nobody knows anything better than HN, ever.
  - rdtsc 2y ago
    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!
- LudwigNagasena 2y ago
  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.
  - rdtsc 2y ago
    But we're talking about basic tenses here: https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Turkish/Reported_Past_Tense 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".
    - LudwigNagasena 2y ago
      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 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.

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 ago
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.
- 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 ago
    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).
mcnamaratw 2y ago
Nobody knows anything better than HN, ever.
- rdtsc 2y ago
  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!
LudwigNagasena 2y ago
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.
- rdtsc 2y ago
  But we're talking about basic tenses here: https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Turkish/Reported_Past_Tense 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".
  - LudwigNagasena 2y ago
    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 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.