yowser
Quirk
- Joined
- May 5, 2014
- Posts
- 3,236
I am not aware of any Indo-european language that employs it, and only became aware of it when Elif Batuman mentioned it in one of her books (cannot recall whether 'The Possessed" or 'the Idiot' - I believe the latter.)citation needed.
She discovered, with a little frisson of excitement, that Hungarian (which her boyfriend spoke, a notoriously difficult language to learn, for anyone) had this tense and employed it the same way as in her ancestral mother tongue Turkish.
In either of these languages (and I suspect many more) if you say 'Mary went to the store' and you SAW her going, you'd use a different tense (evidential) than if you only knew she did so from some other perspective (someone told you.)
It functions as an empirical 'truth index' - you know it's true since you experienced it with one of your own senses. I love it.