Re: Immediate future tense

Eric Christopherson wrote:

> Nik Taylor wrote:
> > "I'm about to ..." would be that, if I understand you correctly.  How
> > about future-past?  Does anyone have that?  By future-past I mean "I was
> > going to ..." or "I was about to ...", that is, at the point of time
> > being referred to, the action had not yet occured, but it has occured by
> > now, or would've occured.  For example, "I was about to call him when
> > the phone rang".
"Iba a llamarlo (me disponma a llamarlo) cuando el telifono sons."

> That's essentially what the conditional tense is in Spanish and French
> (and probably other Romance languages). In fact, the book about French I
> have on my lap right now calls it "future in the past". The conditional
> translates to "would ..." in English.
Not quite.  The conditional is a mode (even if some gramatitians called it a
tense of the indicative mode).  I cannot imagine at this moment an example of
using conditional as "future in past"... in indirect speach the conditional is
used, as well as "would" in English, for refering to future tenses said in the
past:

"Yo me iri"             I will go
"El dijo que se irma"   He said he would go

But I guess this is not what Nik was specting.

-- Carlos Th