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[–] 54 points 3 days ago (11 children)

Turkish has a different verb tense for something you personally witnessed vs heard second hand or inferred, and I really appreciate that

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  • [–] 11 points 3 days ago (5 children)

    What the fuck, the English stole everything that wasn't bolted down and they didn't take THAT with them? PRIORITIES, guys. Skip the French crap and integrate THIS

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  • [–] 6 points 3 days ago (4 children)

    We can still do it. Time to ask what the turkish word is so we can integrate them into our Frankenstein language

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  • [–] 4 points 3 days ago (3 children)

    I looked it up earlier and don't remember the exact characters so forgive the romanization but it's basically changing "di" to "mis" at the end of verbs.

    "It rained" vs "apparently it rained" when you did not actually see it raining but the sidewalk is wet.

    "Ali is sick" vs "Ali is supposedly sick" when you did not confirm it (or perhaps doubt Ali's claim??)

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  • [–] 6 points 3 days ago* (2 children)

    Thanks for making it clearer. Just to add actual turkish so people can see properly :

    Yağmur yağdı > It rained
    Yağmur yağmış > It's been said that it rained

    Ali hasta > Ali is sick
    Ali hastamış > It's been said that Ali is sick

    Yağmur > rain
    yağ > to spread/to rain
    dı > past indicator
    mış > second person reporting, past

    hasta > sick

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  • [–] 1 point 2 days ago (1 child)

    wait, is that yag also the root for yogurt? sorry for the lack of diacritics

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  • [–] 7 points 3 days ago (4 children)

    Hey for no reason in particular, what is that word?

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  • [–] 6 points 2 days ago

    Evidential past tense. Depends the verb, but it's usually verb-miş, which kinda sounds like 'misha' or 'mush' to my US ears. It's used when you haven't personally witnessed something. Like if you go outside and see puddles of water and a cloud that just passed and a rainbow, it clearly just rained but you didn't TECHNICALLY see it rain, so you say yağmur yağmış instead of yağmur yağdı if you had actually seen it.

    So when you find a group of people gossiping, you just hear 'misha' 'misha' 'misha' 'misha' because they're all talking about inferred info, and I've heard it called the gossip tense.

    And it's appropriate to note that I know all this second hand. I don't know any Turkish (besides Dur = stopsign from geoguessr), this is from my language nerd friend who speaks a decent amount, so I probably need to throw a -miş in here somewhere.

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