odd tenses - English doesn't have a monopoly
In my first post, I mentioned the difficulties posed by the simple present tense for people with other language backgrounds, so it occurred to me that, to paint a more balanced picture, I should also introduce examples of unusual tenses in other languages.
In Modern Greek, there is a situation which has been causing me headaches for years. This is in complex sentences, where after the "na" particle either one of two forms can be used in most cases, producing a difference in meaning. The following is an example from an exercise created by Theodora Antonakopoulou:
The following two sentences can both be translated as "He is too young to smoke" in English.
1. Eínai polú mikrós gia na kapnízei.
2. Eínai polú mikrós gia na kapnísei.
The first example uses the "continuous" form - the same form as is used in the present tense (he smokes = kapnízei).
The second example uses the subjunctive form, which really has no translation in English except for the awkward "that he smoke", as in "I suggest that he smoke."
The first example implies that he has started smoking already and that the speaker doesn't approve, whereas the second example implies that he has not started smoking yet and the speaker feels that it is too early for him to start.
Here is another example:
The following two sentences can both be translated as "I can't write with that pencil" in English. Note that the letter w is used to represent the Greek letter omega and y to represent psi.
1. Den mporw na grafw m'autó to molúbi.
2. Den mporw na grayw m'autó to molúbi.
Again, the first example uses the continuous and the second uses the subjunctive.
The difference this time is that, in the first example, the implication is that for some reason I don't like the pencil, whereas in the second it isn't sharp so I can't write with it.
In Turkish, there is also an odd tense, but this one is of a different nature. I recently received an e-mail from a Turkish speaker, who wrote the following sentence to me, "You supposed to be right." If she had not forgotten the helping verb "are", the sentence would have been grammatically correct ("You are supposed to be right."), but it would not have conveyed the meaning she intended. I assume that she was translating the following sentence:
Hakliymis,siniz.
Note that the Turkish s with a cedille under it (pronounced like sh) is represented by s, (this is an e-mail convention) and that none of the i's should have dots.
This is the tense usually referred to as the "mis, tense" or "hearsay tense". It is a tense used to mean that the speaker/writer has heard that what he/she is saying is true. Thus, she meant that according to something she had read or heard I was right.
Here are some other examples:
1. Saat sekizde gelecekmis,.
2. Buraya yeni tas,inmis,siniz.
3. Çok iyi bir ogretmen imis,.
These can be translated as follows:
1. He said he would come at eight.
2. I heard that you just moved here recently.
3. She's supposed to be a great teacher.
In each case, the phrases "he said", "I heard that", and "supposed to be" are included in the tense.
If anyone reading this blog knows of other examples of languages with unusual tenses, I would love to hear about them.
The squeaky wheel - good or bad?
I recently ran across a Turkish saying, "Aglamayan çocuga meme verilmez." The literal translation of this is "The child who doesn't cry doesn't get the nipple." But the moral translation is "The squeaky wheel gets the grease." In other words, in both Turkish and English-speaking society, it is a good thing to stand out and make your needs known.
On the other hand, I have been told that in Japanese (not one of my languages, although I took two semesters of it once upon a time!), there is a saying, "The nail that sticks out gets hit on the head." This would be the opposite moral message, i.e. it is not a good thing to be different from others or get one's voice heard.
This shows the fundamental difference between Far Eastern society and that of the West. Turkey, which is often referred to as a crossroads or bridge between East and West, sometimes sits on the one side and sometimes on the other. But in terms of this particular aspect of society, the language seems to point to a more Western-leaning point of view.
Ordinal numbers - why so complicated?
A Farsi speaker on another Yahoo group of which I am a member - this one for folks who get together here in Vancouver to chat in French - created the following poll for members of the group:
"Will you be able to attend the meet up
on Wedensday November 30'th? Where do
you prefer it to be?
o Yes, Coppa Joes (4'th+Alma)
o Yes, Kits Coffee Company (4'th+Yew)
o Yes, Cafe deux Soleil, 2096 Commercial Drive
o No, I am not attending meetup at this date. "
Besides the error in the date (it's a Tuesday, not a Wednesday), the misspelling of "Wednesday" and the grammar errors in the fourth option, something interesting that caught my eye was the fact that he had apparently not learned the English convention for writing ordinal numbers when the actual number is used instead of the word. This got me thinking about how unwieldy this convention is in English.
I don't know what this convention would be in Farsi, but I know that in other languages it is quite simple and uniform: In German, you just put a period after the number: erste =1. zweite = 2. dritte = 3.; in Spanish, it's always an "o": primero = 1o segundo = 2o trito = 3o; in French, it's almost always -e: première = 1e deuxième = 2e troisième = 3e.
So why is it so complicated in English? Imagine what a headache it must be for those learning English to remember 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th! And just when they think they're home free, along come 21st, 22nd, & 23rd. Mon dieu!
Kafetzou - What's in a name?
My screen name, Kafetzou, was born of an incident at Balkan Camp many years ago, but I won't get into that now. What I will get into is the word itself. It's a Greek word, and it means "the woman who reads the coffee grounds" - that's me. But how did it come into being?
It started with the Arabic word "qahwe", meaning coffee. Presumably, this word originally came from Amharic, as we know that coffee originated in Ethiopia. "Qahwe" passed into Turkish as "kahve", since Turkish does not have the two different guttural stops that Arabic has (qaf & kaf) - it only has the one, "k", and it uses "v" to represent the missing "w" sound (that's how the Arabic "wa" (="and") became "ve" in Turkish).
In Turkish, the word also obtained the suffix "-ci", pronounced like "gee" in English, meaning one who has some kind of professional dealing with the thing, either as a seller, maker, or some other purveyor. Thus, a taksici is a taxi driver, and a fotokopici is a guy who makes photocopies (for others). A kahveci was probably usually a coffee seller, as in the brandname of Turkish coffee most often found in North America, "Kahveci Mehmet Effendi".
This word in turn passed into Greek, becoming "kafetzis", with the same meaning. This is because Greek does not have the sound /dzh/, as in the initial and final sounds of the English word "judge" (or the Turkish suffix "-ci"), so it substitutes the two sounds "tz". "Kafetzou" is the genitive of the same word. To make most names and some professions feminine in Greek, one need only use the genitive. Thus, "papadopoulos" is the offspring of the "papas" or priest, and a woman with this last name would be called "papadopoulou". A person who does things with passion is a "meraklis" from the Turkish word "merak", meaning curiosity, which curiously became passion in Greek. A woman who does things with passion is a "meraklou".
One other interesting note: In Greek, not all professions work like this. For example, the male doctor is "o giatros", and the female doctor is "h giatros" (where "h" represents the Greek letter "eta"), the only difference being the gender of the article. But I digress.
At any rate, that is the explanation of my screen name.
Simple present tense - is it really so simple?
The simple present tense, which is usually the first lesson in any grammar-based syllabus for learning English as a Second/Foreign Language, is deceptively complex. I think that one thing that compounds this difficulty is the name of the tense itself. The name, which is derived from comparison of the FORM of this tense with that of simple present tenses in other languages, belies the complex nature of its usage in English.
The worst thing is that it's actually not present. Instead, it has quite specific time-related rules, such as the following: habitual action, general truths, repeated action, sensory perception, etc. The actual present time in English is expressed using the present progressive (continuous) tense. This leads to misunderstandings when the tense is used incorrectly.
The following is a quote from a Yahoo group I belong to. This group is for those who want to discuss issues relating to the Turkish language. You can find it at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/turkishlearner/. Here is what the contributor wrote:
"I know two language centeres in Istanbul which are
organizing language courses in turkish at every time
of the year."
What the writer, a native Bulgarian speaker, meant to say of course was "which organize ..." (or even "which offer..."). Her statement could easily be misunderstood to mean that these language centers are currently in the process of organizing these courses. I would attribute this error to an incomplete understanding of when each of these two tenses is used, resulting in an "overgeneralization" error - having learned that the present progressive is often used in many places where her natural (Bulgarian) impulse would have been to use the simple present, she employed the present progressive here where the simple present would have been the correct tense.
I submit that the Simple Present Tense should be renamed: The Complex Present Tense.
