Turkish language has a gossip tense

Original Article ↗ Hacker News Discussion ↗

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).