This last week we’re going over small different grammatical features, most recently phrases with the construction "X… X (da), for example: ya… ya (da)…. which means either… or… They are a little odd since if there is a verb used, it is placed in between the two clauses, which isn’t abnormal in English, but isn’t always the most intuitive.
Last week however, was my favorite Turkish verb tense: miş past tense aka story past. This is completely unique to Turkish (and I’m going to guess a ton of different languages). Information that is told second hand is given in miş-past, rather than the standard past (di- past). This can be used to impart so much more meaning than I’m used to and a variety of different subtexts. One of the songs we listened to, Dedikodu (Levant Yüksel) is about people gossiping about the singer, but instead of saying a kind of cumbersome phrase like “I heard that it is said that I …” the singer can just miş tense in the first person, which in two syllables accomplishes quite a bit of heavy lifting grammatically and semantically. From Merve’s description of its usage, it’s situational and used in a lot of different contexts, and I suspect that it will be difficult for me to get acclimated to using it in the future, but for now it’s easy to use. I am very curious how it developed since I don’t know of any other languages with a narrative/story past tense.
Song of the Week:
Dedikodu - Levent Yüksel
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