Re: THEORY: Tenses (was: Re: THEORY: ... Auxiliaries...)

Ray Brown wrote:

>>But of course, we traditionally only talk about three "tenses" in
>>English, past, present, and future,
>
>That's because of Latin   :)
>
>>and a good argument can be made
>>that morphologically there are really only two tenses (past and
>>present).
>
>More accurately, past & non-past. Future time is always denoted by
>so-called 'present tenses' after the conjunctions 'if' and 'when' in
>English, and are often denoted the same way as main verbs; for example:
>I am staying in Paris next week.
>He is coming here to morrow.
>She is writing home as soon as she gets here.
>etc.
>
>In the strict sense of 'the grammatical which correlates most distinctly
>with distinctions of time' English has only two - all the rest is conveyed
>by combining tense with aspect and/or mood. In the sense used in
>traditional grammars, which combine aspect and, often, mood, then English
>has a dozen or more, depending upon how you count them   :)
>
>Traditionally, Latin is said to have six indicative tenses; in the strict
>meaning of 'time distinction' it has only three.
>
But except latin and romance languages, are there languages that really have
a grammatical futur?


But I'm happy that this discution happened because I was searching a way to
express the futur otherwise than with Tense/Aspect prefixes like past and
present because it sounded odd...

I will simply have to use the present (that I will now have to call
non-past) and an adverb (that acts like auxiliaries) like "tomorow", "in two
days", "in a while", or "in to much time for being useful to think about it
for the moment"...

I like that last one. There is also an auxiliary for what I said in another
post, "too much times ago to be rememberable accurately" that also is a
simple auxiliary

Is one of the two an ANADEW? I'd prefer not because I think I have a good
idea here

- Max