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.
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.
> 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.
In 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.
Is 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?
That’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?
Turkish 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).
What 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.
In 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.
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.
I 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.
To 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.
(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.)
I 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."
Well 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
Turkish is one of my favorite languages I've learned, and one of the best languages for a language learner. I think it's great for learners for two reasons: first of all, the grammar and orthography is extremely regular, and probably more importantly is that in my experience turkish speaking people are more than happy to engage is extended small talk about anything, are extremely eager to understand you despite your horrible turkish, and are almost always impressed by any level of effort. This is in terrible contrast to french or german, where not only does the grammar or spelling horrify, but people are almost unwilling to understand your pitiful efforts :(
The thing about Turkish is that the grammar is very forgiving to mistakes while preserving meaning: word order can be leveraged for subtle emphasis but pretty much doesn't matter for general meaning. Conjugations are pretty much always standard. There is a "correct" ordering for the suffixes but the meaning is generally obvious even without them. If you mess up the vowel harmony it just sounds odd but again the meaning is clear. You can often omit articles because the suffixes mirror them. It's also a phonetic language - there's no "sounds different at the end of the word" 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 :-)
Going the other way around, coming from a Slavic language I was really surprised at how many Turkish words we have. I didn't realize this until watching the show Diriliş: Ertuğrul, and doing a double take every other line. "Why are there so many Serbo-Croat words in there???"
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.
A tourist who can speak a few sentences in Turkish could get a lot of free stuff in small shops when I used to live in Istanbul. My "cute" French didn't have the same effect in Paris though.
As someone that has lived in French and German speaking countries and nowadays speaks both fluently, I would assert usually in French speaking countries there is the cultural issue of speaking directly in English versus trying a very basic "Parlez vous Anglais?" as initial question.
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.
> there is the cultural issue of speaking directly in English versus trying a very basic "Parlez vous Anglais?" as initial question
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
Yeah, the difference in France if you try vs. don't try can be dramatic. My first school trip to France with my French class, one of the girls in my class tried asking for something in a small shop in Paris in English. The entire shop went quiet, until she tried again in French whereon they immediately spoke English to her.
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'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...
For the speakers of European languages it is usually quite difficult to learn to pronounce correctly some of the sounds of Arabic. Turkish does not have any sounds hard to pronounce for Europeans.
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).
I don't know any Arabic unfortunately. They are completely different language families with only slight overlap in vocabulary, but beyond that I can't make a comparison. I would say it probably depends on what your language learning goals are, but turkish is super fun to learn and speak, and its super fun to travel in turkey or just to hang out in istanbul. You might also surprise yourself speaking turkish in China one day with some Xinjiang people as well :D
I took three years of Arabic as an undergrad, it's an interesting language to study, but needing to learn the alphabet will make it more difficult than Turkish, I would say. Which might be fine if you're looking for a challenge!
All other things being equal, I didn't feel up to the task of learning a language that regularly omits all vowels in written form. But man, that calligraphy...
My first language is English. It's not that I found the grammar is 'easy' in the sense of being simple, but rather that it is extremely regular, I'm not sure there are even _any_ irregular conjugations. Once you learn a pattern, it is easy to apply it, and because the language is agglutinative, you can really build a lot from some basic root words, which I find fascinating. Actually, when I then learned German, I was able to lean on all cases I learned in Turkish since we usually don't think in terms of genitive, accusative, and dative in English
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.
Yeah it took me until B2 or so before I could get any Germans to really engage with me in German. My son grew up there and his German was quite good while we lived there, and even when I reached C1 he was perpetually ashamed of my accent and all of my grammatical errors. Of course, now that it's been some time since we've lived there my German has only gotten worse and he suffers even more when I try to practice
Désolé, nous avons nous même été élevé dans une démarche visant à systématiquement développer un sentiment de culpabilité pour chaque écart à la sacrocainte norme langagière promu par une bande de réactionnaires sans compétences linguistiques qui se prennent pour les défenseurs de la langue dont ils fommentent la sclérose.
It is called evidentiality. It doesn't have any direct relationship to time, as one would expect with a tense. Southern Quechua has a reported event evidential affix as well. A friend who is a speaker of Quechua was once horrified, hearing that a man was going to be given a life sentence for murder in Bolivia. They played a portion of his confession over the radio, and the accused man used the reported event evidential through the entirety. Literally, saying that all his words were second hand, dubious information. To my friend, the implication was that he was saying what the police had told him to say. Apparently, those judging the case were not aware of the subtlety, and it did not come through in the Spanish translation of the confession, resulting in a conviction. Whatever the facts of the case were in the end, what is interesting is that for Quechua speakers like my friend, due to the use of the reported event evidential, there was no confession, even though all of the events of a murder were stated in the first person.
I learned French because I moved to another country, and I was learning verb conjugations by regularly looking at the (very long) conjugation table. One day I just randomly looked at the table of verb conjugations in my mother tongue, Turkish, and I couldn't believe it, it's many times longer than the one in French! The fact that there are so many things I use in daily life without much effort has shown me how wonderfully the brain works.
Yeah! Turkish is a very agglutinative language, much more than languages like English or French. This makes Turkish richly packed with meaning but also very complex.
No, it doesn't make it a tense. Different moods may have their own form in one or more tenses and it has nothing to do with being "optional" either. To be fair, distinction is a bit artificial, but generally these are defined by their meaning. "Tense" applies to variability in time (past, present, etc), and "mood" applies to variability in reality (factual statement, hearsay, wishful thinking, etc)
Readit News
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
I could imagine something similar happening in Turkish.
Deleted Comment
(note) linguists argue about this just like they argue about everything else, but it is the safer assumption for non-linguists.
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 :-)
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.
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
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'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).
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.
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.
"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.