Re: Turkish tense question

Jack Campin - bogus address wrote:
In Orhan Pamuk's "Istanbul: Memories and the City" there is a
passage about childhood memories and the nature of the Turkish
language:

"I feel compelled to add 'or so I've been told'. In Turkish we have
a special tense that allows us to distinguish hearsay from what we
have seen with our own eyes; when we are relating dreams, fairy
tales or past events we could not have witnessed, we use this
tense. It is a useful distinction to make as we 'remember' our
earliest life experiences, our cradles, our baby carriages, our
first steps, as reported by our parents, stories to which we listen
with the same rapt attention we might pay to a brilliant tale that
happened to concern some other person."

A couple of questions: he means "aspect" not "tense," right?

It's always described as a tense in books on Turkish grammar.

Not in the only one I have (by Éva Csató and Lars Johanson). They call it the "indirective past", and classify it as one of three "epistemic modes".

It's
an alternative past tense ending, not a distinct suffix to indicate
dubiety.

Indeed, that's correct of course. Unlike the "mnemonic past", -diydi, which is formed by combining the simple past -di and the past of the copula.

John.


gel-di he came
gel-mish he reportedly came

but also:

gel-mish-tir he came

where -tir is the third person singular suffix for "to be". It's
a bit more formal than "geldi" and has no suggestion of dubiety
about it.

Anyone know how far back it goes? Do all Turkic languages have it?

==== j a c k at c a m p i n . m e . u k ===
<http://www.campin.me.uk> ==== Jack Campin, 11 Third St, Newtongrange
EH22 4PU, Scotland == mob 07800 739 557 CD-ROMs and free stuff:
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