Turkish language has a gossip tense
Turkish has a special verb form often dubbed a “gossip tense,” used to report events the speaker did not directly witness, which sparks debate over whether it should be classified as a tense, a mood (inferential/evidential), or both. Commenters compare this feature to evidential markers in languages like Quechua, Bulgarian, Latvian, and forms of French and German indirect speech, noting that English instead relies on extra words (“allegedly,” “they say”) rather than verb morphology. The thread also branches into how Turkish grammar works more broadly, why many learners find it regular and forgiving, and how such grammatical systems interact with culture, history, and even legal interpretation.
Nature of the “gossip tense” in Turkish
- Refers primarily to the suffix -miş (with vowel-harmony variants), traditionally called “learned/reported past” or “inferential past.”
- Marks past events not directly witnessed by the speaker: hearsay, inference, or later realization (“apparently X happened”).
- Often contrasted with -di, the “witnessed” or factual past.
- Also used to express surprise or discovery (“Oh, the water’s gone,” “This food turned out very spicy”).
Tense vs. mood (and aspect) debate
- Some participants insist it is a genuine tense, taught that way in Turkish schools and major grammars; it always locates the event in the past.
- Others argue linguistically it’s primarily an inferential / evidential mood, since it encodes the speaker’s relationship to truth (reported, non-witnessed) rather than just time.
- Extended subthread debates tense vs. mood vs. aspect (e.g., analogy with English “present perfect”), and differences between school grammar and modern linguistics.
- Consensus: it marks both time (past) and evidentiality; classification depends on theoretical framework and terminology.
Comparisons to English and other languages
- English lacks a dedicated verb inflection for this; approximations via reported speech (“He said…”) or lexical markers (“apparently,” “allegedly”) and scare quotes.
- English is said to have relatively few inflectional moods but many periphrastic tense–aspect combinations; AAVE has richer TAM distinctions.
- Other languages with evidential or inferential marking are mentioned: Bulgarian (including “double inferential”), Quechua (reported-event suffix with legal consequences in a case described), Latvian, some South Asian languages, Korean, etc.
- French, Spanish, and Dutch sometimes use conditional or other forms idiomatically to signal “allegedly.”
Usage in media and everyday Turkish
- Disagreement on news style: some say neutral past is preferred in journalism; others say speakers still use the inferential when they did not witness events.
- Using the “witnessed” past for non-witnessed events can imply you were present and may trigger follow-up questions.
Turkish as a learner’s language & other features
- Multiple comments praise Turkish for:
- Highly regular, agglutinative morphology and phonetic spelling.
- Error-tolerant grammar (word order flexibility, forgiving vowel harmony).
- Sociocultural willingness to engage with learners.
- Noted lack of articles; reliance on suffixes and context instead.
- Rich kinship terminology (different words for maternal/paternal aunts/uncles, special in-law terms) and additional moods (e.g., imprecative for cursing).