Re: future past

David Peterson wrote:
> It seems like that should be possible for any old
> future statement,
> even, "I'm going to go to the store tomorrow", but it doesn't seem to
> work.  I can't
> grok it, man.
Well, in principle, at least, it's possible to be certain about a past
or present event (philosophical questions of what is reality and the
like notwithstanding).  In many languages, you can indicate
inflectionally how certain you are of a statement.  Thus, you can say
"He went to the store", and make it clear whether you know this from
observation, from deduction, or just hearsay.  However, it's impossible
to *know* that a future event will occur.

However, I personally feel no such difference between "I went" and "I
will go".

John Cowan wrote:
> Most future forms comes from things like will (I will go = it is my will
> to go), or necessity (I have to go, and its exact parallels in the
> Western Romance languages, which use infinitive + haber), or wish
> (Romanian, maybe other Balkan languages) or aspect, or realis/irrealis
> ("Are you God, to make realis statements about the future?"), or
> sequence ("en train de").
Don't forget purpose.  "Be going to" originally implied "be going
[somewhere] for the purpose of".

> Classical Latin has an inflected and unanalyzable future, but it's
> suspiciously regular, as if it was formed fairly recently in the
> language.  Anybody know its origin?
One theory that I've read is that it came from the stem of the verb plus
derivatives of IE *bhu (be, cognate with English "be" and Latin "fuit")