Talk:Gnomic aspect

"Curiosity killed the cat"

Is this really an example of a general pattern of past tense general truths? Isn't it just a specific saying, poetically evoking "a story we all know about a cat"? How do I know the last Wikipedian didn't just invent this? Here is where a citation would really be helpful. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 178.38.38.180 (talk) 21:17, 13 July 2013 (UTC)

Gnomic tense in Ancient Greek

As far as I know, Ancient Greek doesn't use the future tense, but the aorist to denote the gnomic aspect. Unfortunately, I only have one German reference (Bornemann & Risch, 1978. Griechische Grammatik, 2nd ed. Frankfurt/M.: Diesterweg; p. 218f.). —Preceding unsigned comment added by Backyard-pirate (talk • contribs) 10:48, 13 May 2010 (UTC)

But that isn't a grammatical form, any more than English present is a gnomic tense. — kwami (talk) 17:48, 24 September 2010 (UTC)

Relationship with generic mood

How does the gnomic tense relate to (and differ from) Generic mood? BurnSpiral (talk) 22:27, 23 July 2010 (UTC)

I don't know. I've proposed a merger. — kwami (talk) 17:48, 24 September 2010 (UTC)

Merged. I only found one example on Google Books. — kwami (talk) 00:34, 12 October 2010 (UTC)

This is incorrect. Gnomic is a mood, not a tense. Some moods require the use of specific tenses in some languages. (The subjunctive mood in English is another good example of this.) A "timeless" tense doesn't make any sense, because establishing a point in time is the only purpose of tense. More info on the distinction can be found at Tense-aspect-mood.

This problem is compounded by the fact that English does not make a strong morphological distinction (or in some cases, any distinction at all) between the three reasons for inflecting verbs, and many people (including many teachers) teach things that aren't tense as tense. For example, the present perfect is a combination of both aspect and tense, but most English classes universally call it the "present perfect tense." I'm not here to complain about education though, I'm here to say that this page should be renamed from "Gnomic tense" to "Gnomic mood" and it should be removed from any categories on "tense." Now that I look, the Grammatical tense page also needs updating to correct this. Carychan (talk) 08:21, 27 October 2010 (UTC)

That sounds a bit like saying zero isn't a number because you can't count to zero. Do you have any refs? — kwami (talk) 08:31, 27 October 2010 (UTC)

I can't think of how this could be mood. How would it be distinct from indicative / realis? It might be independent from tense, though: "Dinosaurs roamed the Earth" (gnomic past). Likewise, it should be possible to have gnomic indicative, gnomic subjunctive, etc. It seems more like aspect. The ELL has an article on "Generics, Habituals, and Iteratives", where it discusses gnomic/generic as habitual aspect or aktionsart. Perhaps move to "gnomic aspect"? — kwami (talk) 09:31, 27 October 2010 (UTC)

Yes, not just the ELL. Several other refs call it an aspect. Moved. — kwami (talk) 13:46, 27 October 2010 (UTC)

Does it exist beyond ancient Greek?

If the gnomic (or the generic) is a linguistic feature unique to ancient Greek, then the article should say so. If it is not, then it'd be great to give some additional example(s). As the article stands today, it says, "English doesn't have it. Ancient Greek (sort of) did." Not very informative about the feature's universality.—PaulTanenbaum (talk) 15:22, 14 June 2012 (UTC)

Some analysis of Hopi consider the -ŋʷi suffix to mark gnomic aspect. ·ʍaunus·snunɐw· 16:01, 22 November 2012 (UTC)