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Comment by _9y71 | Hacker News Reader

I learned French because I moved to another country, and I was learning verb conjugations by regularly looking at the (very long) conjugation table. One day I just randomly looked at the table of verb conjugations in my mother tongue, Turkish, and I couldn't believe it, it's many times longer than the one in French! The fact that there are so many things I use in daily life without much effort has shown me how wonderfully the brain works.

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Note that French does have a tense for gossip.

You can say: julie aurait couché avec pierre hier, meaning julie allegedly selpt with pierre yesterday.

But it's not a cultural thing to use it outside of tv or books.

Il paraît que quelqu'un voudrait faire croire que ce genre de phrase n'est employé que dans des œuvres littéraires et télévisuelles. :)

Ce quoi on dirait n'est pas vrai du tout.

"On diraît" est utilisé par les enfants de 6 ans pour parler de jouer un rôle, mais pas vraiment par les adultes pour reporter un commérage.

BS (Baliverne Saugrenue)!

La tournure correcte, "voudrait" n'est en pratique que très peu utilisée pour le témoignage indirect au quotidien.

"Il paraît qu'on a voulu te faire croire que ce genre de phrase n'est employée que dans des œuvres littéraires et télévisuelles" est beaucoup plus réaliste.

Indicatif + participe passé, ou imparfait. Le conditionnel est surtout utilisé pour l'hypothétique non lié aux ragots et encore, par des gens comme dans ce thread qui se soucient de leur language.

Par contre, au journal de 20h: "on dit dans les milieux autorisés qu'un accord secret aurait été signé" est tout à fait courant.

French learner here: I read that as "Julie would have slept with Pierre yesterday." I take it there's some mood subtlety I'm missing?

What you say is grammatically correct. But if you want to find out whether it implies gossip or past conditional, you need to look at the context.

Context. Or even the lack thereof. In this case the use of the conditional implies an unstated condition, the "if I'm right about it" condition.

This is more idiomatic than grammatical. It's the same in Spanish. In English we don't have this sort of idiom, so that phrase doesn't translate very well.

How would that be phrased in Spanish? Are you talking about the future tense in constructions like "Será que...?" or "Estará volviendo" to say "he must be returning"?

Julia habría dormido con Pedro anoche.

As explained, mood is implied. This is a common pattern in news reports, etc., not quite colloquial

Yeah, it's very common in news because it's a very concise way to indicate the possibility of doubt because it's just "gossip" (as the title here would have it).

Yes we do, “…will have slept…”

Merci.

Now that you say this, the exact same thing is used in Dutch to indicate something is a rumour.

Ze zouden met elkaar naar bed zijn geweest.

French has four base tenses and four compounding aspects.

Yeah! Turkish is a very agglutinative language, much more than languages like English or French. This makes Turkish richly packed with meaning but also very complex.

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