this post was submitted on 25 Apr 2024
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I just want to point out that English's future tense does exist, but it's just non-distinct in many cases because, well, as you've said, English is fucked.
You need context to determine whether this statement is talking about the present or the future. So much of the language is implied contextually that you can just drop off words and assume the listener will understand.
It's so funny because whereas a lot of other languages have rules with defined exceptions here and there, speaking English is more of a theoretical approach.
It feels like English just happened one day and we're all trying to figure out why.
I feel like this also makes it useful in that you can butcher the hell out of it, and still communicate somewhat effectively. I don't feel that's the case in some other languages, or maybe I'm willing to put up with my colleague's broken English far more than they're willing to put up with my broken German/Spanish/etc.
I think English allows you more different ways of doing things than most other languages. The future tense being "going to X" and one of the past tenses being "used to X" means that new English learners don't need to spend as much time studying yet another verb tense.
OTOH, the spelling and pronunciation is such a massive hurdle compared to a simple language like Spanish.
Yeah, it's definitely convenient in most cases, I would say. Though it can also be inconvenient when messaging, because sometimes said need to add context can read very unnaturally in an otherwise grammatically correct sentence.
My uneducated guess is that England had so many colonies throughout history that a lot of languages affected English and we have this Frankenstein of a language
That's part of it, but I think a bigger part is all the countries that colonized the British Isles. English has elements of Germanic languages like German, Dutch, Old Norse, etc. It has elements of Latin languages from Latin itself to French. The British Empire definitely resulted in words being brought back from the various colonies, but the English they spoke then was fairly similar to what we know today. It was already this weird, bastardized Germanic / French language.
There are various future tenses.
Future Simple / Simple Future: Will + [base form] -- I'll eat that later; or Going + [infinitive] -- I'm going to eat that later.
Future Continuous: Will be + [present participle] -- I'll be eating that later.
Future Perfect: Will have + [past participle] -- I'll have eaten that later.
Future Perfect Continuous: Will have been + [present participle] -- I'll have been eating that later.
There's also using the present continuous to talk about the future -- I'm eating that tomorrow.
Also, the simple present -- I eat that tomorrow.
English is flexible, but it's also weird. There are a lot of distinctions that matter to native English speakers but that are really hard to put into rules. Like "will" vs. "going to". They have slightly different meanings, but good luck coming up with an easy to understand rule about when to use each version.