Talk:Future tense
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[edit] Periphrasis
Could you explain why, as languages evolve, future tenses are usually substituted by periphrasis? Fear of the irrealis?
- I'm not at all certain that there is a general rule that governs the replacement of future tenses. In western Romance, they seem to have been paraphrases at one time, but now are fully re-integrated, though their relationship to the infinitive and the verbs derived from habere are usually relatively transparent. The replacement of the Latin future with a paraphrase is likely to have been made necessary by phonetic changes in vulgar Latin, which made futures like amabit ambiguous to perfects like amavit. In Germanic, there isn't even a future tense per se in the Gothic language, so periphrasis is all we get.
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- But they are not that stable. You have forms like "voy a {verb}" in Spanish or gonna in English.
- Elsewhere, there doesn't seem to be a trend to replacing them wholesale. In demotic Greek, the inherited future lives on. Don't know enough about Slavic to say, nor about non-Indo-European languages. -- Smerdis of Tlön 15:54, 27 Jan 2004 (UTC)
Is there a specific exact need to use the term periphrasis when most users will have little enough Greek? Could we not use a term like circumlocution ? Latin, I know, but surely with far greater currency amongst users --Jatrius 23:06, 12 December 2006 (UTC)
[edit] Simple Future
Pardon me if i'm wrong, but as the will + verb construction requires the "will" auxillary, it is not a "simple" tense. Simple refers to tenses indicated without auxillies. is that not right?
- What bothers me as that IT ISN'T EVEN A BLOODY TENSE! It is an 'aspect'. How can we get this changed? --JohnO 18:28, 7 November 2005 (UTC)
In languages other than English, such as Italian, the simple future is simple because only one word stands for "I will have gone" which is andro (the o is accented). In the infinitive "to go" it is andare. It is possible, therefore, that the reason English grammar books call this a simple tense is because of its derivation from other languages.
Combining the section on future perfect would not be the best option. As it is if someone is looking for future perfect he/she can find it easily. If it is combined, then the search engine must reflect the "future" tense when someone has searched for "future perfect." Or a disambiguation page would be necessary.
[edit] "shall" obsolete?
This seems a premature assertion to me - I still use "shall" for the first person - and few people will ask the question "Will we dance?" 139.163.138.14 06:11, 29 March 2006 (UTC)
[edit] Merger from future
I think it's pretty obvious the future tense section from future needs merging into here. Comments? Objections? Grandmasterka 02:53, 30 September 2006 (UTC)
- I agree. Merge supported.--Boson 18:33, 13 October 2006 (UTC)
