Are there any that have evidentiality fixed into the grammar? I know Estonian, Turkish and Abkhaz have an evidentiality system that is part of their grammars.
For example, in my native language of Bulgarian verbs can be inflected for evidentiality although thatâs more of a colloquial thing and depends on the context.
ТОК иСŃĐ´Đľ Ń ŃанаŃĐ°. Toy izyade hranata. - lit. He ate the food.
The verb is in the aorist past tense and itâs in the basic indicative mood. This sentence can also mean something like He ate the food. AND the speaker has seen the action and has made an observation.
ТОК иСŃĐť Ń ŃанаŃĐ°. Toy izyal hranata. - lit. He ate the food.
The verb here is in the aorist perfect tense. The sentence can mean He ate the food. AND the speakers know this because someone has told them that the action has ocurred.
ТОК йиН иСŃĐť Ń ŃанаŃĐ°. Toy bil izyal hranata. - lit. He had eaten the food.
йиН is aorist past tense, singular of to be while иСŃĐť is the aorist past tense, singular of to eat. The whole sentence can also mean something along the lines of He has apparently eaten the food but I do not believe it.
***Not sure if Iâve used the correct terminology here as Bulgarian verbs tend to be quite difficult (and Iâve studied this 7 years ago in secondary school).***
Comments
charlemartyr ⢠12 points ⢠2021-03-21
German has a less-used subjunctive used primarily to express allegation or reported speech. For example:
Er hat das Essen gegessen
He ate the food
The verb phrase here is in the perfect tense in the indicative mood, just as you describe above.
Then we have: Er hätte das Essen gegessen
He would have eaten the food
Here we have the same verb phrase in the subjunctive 2 (Konjunktiv II), which here expresses counterfactuality.
But then German has: Er habe das Essen gegessen
He (allegedly) ate the food
Here, the helping verb haben, which forms part of the perfect verbal phrase, looks at first glance to learners of German as if it is an incorrect 1st person singular conjugation, but that form here indicates the subjunctive 1 (Konjunktiv I), which usually expresses that the evidence for the statement is hearsay. Newspapers, for example, employ this version of the subjunctive extensively when reporting. In everyday speech, itâs usually limited to a kind of replacement for quoted speech, and even then, itâs fairly rare/formal.
Panceltic ⢠7 points ⢠2021-03-22
ĐиН is not aorist ;)
Also (correct me if Iâm wrong), thereâs no such thing as âaorist perfectâ. Your first example is aorist, and the second is perfect.
Anyway I think Albanian has a similar system.
dis_legomenon ⢠2 points ⢠2021-03-22
The WALS survey on evidential marking gives some further examples: Dutch, where the modal verb corresponding to Englishâs must is used to mark indirect evidentiality and Georgian, where the Perfect has the same role.
Something similar exists in Romance languages, where modal/temporal suffixes also have the additional function of marking evidentiality. In French, the conditional marks indirect evidentiality (il aurait mangĂŠ la nourriture - I heard/I deduce that he ate the food), while in Italian the conditional is restricted to hearsay (avrebbe mangiato il cibo - I heard that he ate the food) while the future is used for inferences (avrĂ mangiato il cibo - I deduce that he ate the food).
This is usually accompanied by a very weak grammaticalisation of direct evidentiality. Instead an neutral verb form is used (il a mangĂŠ la nourriture, for example, which doesnât necessarily mean the speaker witnessed it).
This sort of reuse of a modal or temporal morpheme (rather than a dedicated morpheme with only that meaning) to encode indirect evidentiality seems fairly typical of Europe (and has been described by Haspelmath as characteristic of an European sprachbund centered on France and Germany), and from what youâve describe it seems to also be what Bulgarian is doing.
cat-head ⢠1 points ⢠2021-03-22
It depends on what you mean by âfixed into the grammarâ. Languages like spanish do not inflect die evidentially but they do have evidentially particles (dizque) which can express a wide arrange of evidential meanings.
paniniconqueso ⢠1 points ⢠2021-03-23
Basque via evidentially markers: omen, bide https://www.ehu.eus/en/web/ilcli/previous-seminars/-/asset_publisher/RhZHKePbjPWr/content/evidentiality-in-basque-comparison-to-neighbouring-languages
Also read: https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/9783110223972/html
Linguistic Realization of Evidentiality in European Languages
Yoshiciv ⢠1 points ⢠2021-03-25
Even though Indo-European languages sometimes use subjunctive liker evidentiality marker, they donât have true evidentiality.
However, some languages have it - probably itâs loaned feature. For example, some of Spanish dialects influenced by Quechua use past perfect when they are reported speech.