It is called evidentiality. It doesn't have any direct relationship to time, as one would expect with a tense. Southern Quechua has a reported event evidential affix as well. A friend who is a speaker of Quechua was once horrified, hearing that a man was going to be given a life sentence for murder in Bolivia. They played a portion of his confession over the radio, and the accused man used the reported event evidential through the entirety. Literally, saying that all his words were second hand, dubious information. To my friend, the implication was that he was saying what the police had told him to say. Apparently, those judging the case were not aware of the subtlety, and it did not come through in the Spanish translation of the confession, resulting in a conviction. Whatever the facts of the case were in the end, what is interesting is that for Quechua speakers like my friend, due to the use of the reported event evidential, there was no confession, even though all of the events of a murder were stated in the first person.
sedatk|1 year ago
mplewis|1 year ago