Re: future past

David Peterson wrote:

> Sally wrote:
>
> <<It may be written on the pavement there (which is just a fancy
> blown-up image of my calendar), but the Ice Age might have come upon
> us.  :)>>
>
> Ah, so *that's* where Radiohead got that lyric...
>
> Something about future tenses has always bothered me conceptually.
> The future tense is always very different from the past tense.  If
> something happened in the past, you simply say it.  That is, you can
> tell someone what happened, and it's no more controversial then
> running your hand through your hair.  By saying that something is
> *going* to happen though you're making a claim.  At least in English.
> I can't conceptualize any kind of future tense (will, go, immediate,
> whatever) where using it renders a simple statement.
This is why, IIRC, in some languages future-tense verbs are mandatorily
marked as irrealis. The future is almost by definition uncertain,
whereas the past and present are at least partly *known*.

> What I'm getting at is that it seems that the future tense is not a
> tense, but, perforce, a tense coupled with an aspect.
Do you mean aspect, or mood?

> Is this just English?  Are there natural languages where you can just
> say something like, "He's walking down the street, tomorrow", and
> it's no more interesting than if you're relating something that
> happened yesterday?
Grammatically, I think so--IIRC Latin has both future indicative and
future subjunctive. Semantically, it's debatable.

> After all, we're equidistant from the future and the past (i.e.,
> we'll never see the future or the past, only the present). Perhaps
> it's that the present and past assume knowledge.  But what if you're
> wrong about the past or present?  You tell a friend, "My mother's at
> store right now", but really she's at the post office at the moment
> of speaking.  How is that any different from saying, "It'll rain
> tomorrow", when it doesn't?
I think it's because certainty is *possible* in the past and present,
but not in the future.

> Take my quote down there. There are a number of ways to read it, but
> at least one way of reading it gives a simple statement of fact.  Its
> truth doesn't rely on a given outcome, since it's either (a)
> impossible to determine the outcome, or (b) incommunicable.  Also,
> it's an opinion.  The truth of the statement can never be determined.
> All these facts free my brain from the traditional
> volitional/prognostic/causative reading of the future.  I don't know
> why, but it seems to.  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.