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In linguistics, tense is a verb conjugation to indicate temporal information, while mood is a conjugation to indicate various kinds of metainformation about the speaker's relationship to the information in the sentence. It's not as common a term as ‘tense’ when discussing English, because English doesn't conjugate for mood, but it is the standard word for describing some features of Turkish morphology such as evidentiality.

Automatic translators, while an impressive and convenient piece of technology, usually focus on providing a plausible gloss in the target language, so typically lose a lot of nuance. For looking up words a dictionary is usually a better bet; for example, Wiktionary has https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/kip#Turkish with a link to the explanation of the English word as well.

> because English doesn't conjugate for mood

It does, but like some other English inflectional patterns the syntax is mostly vestigial.

All I ask is that the two of you be polite to each other has be in subjunctive mood; if it were indicative, it would be are instead.

Something that I find interesting is that, while conjugating verbs for mood is largely vestigial in English, the more general phenomenon of paying close attention to the relationship between the sentence and reality, the focus that mood expresses, is very much alive. It's just that it's mostly moved out of the inflectional system.

It has constructs for a few different moods/modes[1], but no conjugation: the morphology used to form moods is borrowed from other verb forms (in your example, the bare infinitive) that were never (as far as I know!) dedicated mood conjugations.

[1]: pedantically they are ‘modes’ in the linguistic jargon, but often referred to as ‘moods’ in discussions of English grammar: linguistically a mood is the grammatical morphology used to signify a mode, which English lacks.

> It has constructs for a few different moods/modes[1], but no conjugation: the morphology used to form moods is borrowed from other verb forms (in your example, the bare infinitive) that were never (as far as I know!) dedicated mood conjugations.

Well, this is mixing an argument about the facts with an argument about the history.

On the facts this is a mood expressed by conjugating the verb. It obviously isn't an infinitive form because it's a finite verb. It is identical with the infinitive form, and this is a general rule of English (only observable with this one verb), but there's nothing stopping different forms from being identical, even identical by rule. In Latin the nominative and accusative case of a neuter noun are always identical.

Sorry, I didn't mean to confuse matters — by pulling in the etymology of the morphology I was trying to be generous to the argument. Namely, I thought there might be a chance that the bare infinitive in e.g. the conditional mood is derived from an older true mood (in the linguistic sense, i.e. a verb form that is sufficient to signify the mode), which I would consider a pretty reasonable justification for considering the bare infinitive there to be a true conditional mood, albeit one that happens to be identical to other forms. I couldn't find evidence for it though, and as far as I know it's not a common feature in other Germanic languages.

As for the syntactic argument — I think it would usually be said not to be the case due to the periphrastic nature of the construction. That is, it's not the verb conjugation itself that signifies the mode but the combination of a conjugation (that is used in a variety of different constructions) with the ‘that’ (or ‘would’, aut cetera, for other moods). As with a lot of these things, though, it's significantly a matter of the conventional definition of terms. For instance in English grammar the ‘full infinitive’ ‹to + bare infinitive› is usually considered a conjugation even though it includes an extra particle. Go figure :)

On that note, it's important to distinguish syntax from semantics: the term ‘bare infinitive’ doesn't mean that morphology is _semantically_ infinitive, the infinitive was just picked as the class representative to name that particular morphology, which is known as the ‘bare infinitive’ wherever it occurs. Ditto with ‘past participle’ and ‘present participle’, and especially ‘gerund’ (which is named after a grammatical function that doesn't even exist in English!).

> I thought there might be a chance that the bare infinitive in e.g. the conditional mood is derived from an older true mood...

CGEL says this:

Given that the three constructions in [24] always select identical verb-forms, it is inappropriate to take imperative, subjunctive, and infinitival as inflectional categories. That, however, is what the traditional grammar does, again retaining distinctions that were valid at an earlier stage of the language but have since been lost

[I'm taking a position that disagrees with this one, but it does address the use of mood in earlier stages of English.]

I feel that that may not directly address your specific question, but it's hard to know what that question is, since English conditional clauses do not use the form you identify as 'bare infinitive'.

> ...an older true mood (in the linguistic sense, i.e. a verb form that is sufficient to signify the mode)

This doesn't make sense. A verb form is never sufficient to signify the semantic mode of a sentence. Nobody ever argues that Latin didn't have inflectional mood, but good luck identifying why a verb appears in the subjunctive if you can't see the rest of the sentence around it.

(There is a whole traditional taxonomy of different Latin subjunctives; the most common cases are conditional clauses, which use subjunctive mood to indicate counterfactuality, commands ("jussive subjunctive"), and wishes ("optative subjunctive"). Another case is "the verb is part of an indirect question". [Do indirect statements use subjunctive verbs? Nooooooooo...])

So, for English, we have a distinction in semantic modality that obligates us to use an exotically-conjugated verb. Why is this not an example of grammatical mood?

accidentallfact 150 days ago

Mood and evidentuality are two somewhat distinct concepts.

Mood denotes the informations factuality, if something is, could be, would be, certainly is so, or there may be moods for direct or indirect commands (tell him to come) and so on.

Evidentiality denotes how the speaker knows - you use different evidentiality if you have directly seen something, if somebody told you, or if you deduced it.

Then there is mirativity, which denotes how expected or unexpecred the information was.

I believe that turkish has all tree.

Oh you're right! I always thought evidentiality was a dedicated Turkish mood — but it's actually a particular use of a tense. TIL :)

inkyoto 150 days ago

A grammatical mood indicates the modality of the verb, and some languages possess rich inventories of the grammatical moods. They are called differently in different languages, but mood is an established term in English.

English has indicative («go», «is going» etc), subjunctive / conjunctive / conditional («went» in «as if they went»), imperative («go!»).

German has two conditional moods – Konjunktiv I and II, for example.

Finno-Ugric languages have many more.

> English has ... subjunctive / conjunctive / conditional («went» in «as if they went»)

That isn't the English subjunctive.

You're correct that this construction expresses the same thing that another language might express by marking a non-indicative mood on the verb, but it would not conventionally be said to use a non-indicative mood. That went is a normal past-tense indicative verb and the modality is expressed by the whole structure of the clause, not just by the inflection of the verb.

In linguistics there's a whole set of parallel vocabulary where one set is for grammatical forms and the mirror set is for the semantics usually expressed by those forms. So you have grammatical "tense" and semantic "time" or grammatical "mood" and semantic "modality". You got the modality right, but not the mood.

Compare the conventional analysis that he will be there tomorrow expresses future time, but is not in future tense because there is no English future tense.

inkyoto 150 days ago

> That isn't the English subjunctive.

No, it is not a proper English subjunctive (a correct example would have been «as if they were» – past subjunctive) or «[we suggested] that they go».

I deliberately lumped subjunctive, conjunctive, and conditional together for brevity. Part of the problem is that many English speakers do not differentiate between subjunctive and conjunctive (conditional) and incorrectly label the latter as subjunctive, but that happens because English does not have a conjunctive (conditional) mood.

English subjunctive is translated into other Indo-European languages either as the conjunctive or indicative mood, as there is no 1:1 mapping in existence.

https://youtu.be/xdpvR3kaXaQ?si=dcNS-3VcH8AMU7dt

lowdownbutter 150 days ago

languagejones has a good overview in this video