[gothic-l] Re: Why German has no future tense

[sollersuk]

--- In gothic-l at yahoogroups.com, jdm314 at a... wrote:
> http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/000521.html
>
> (though he's a bit confused- Proto-Indo-European is normally said
to have no
> future tense either)
>
I agree, he is a bit confused.  Tenses in European languages are very
fluid things, and if you look very closely at endings even in Latin
and Greek you can see the ghosts of what look like auxiliary verbs
stuck onto the end.  Italian went through the cycle again.

French has a nice definite future tense, and uses it to a
considerable extent when referring to past events that are in the
future with respect to even earlier events.

Literary Welsh uses the same tense for present and future, but
colloquially uses "bydd yn mynd" (to be going to) to express future -
either a borrowing from or parallel development with English, which
is prone to use that construction as much, if not more, than "will"
and "shall".

Come to think of it, the French use "aller" as an auxiliary to
express the future pretty often as well.




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