Talk:Future tense
From Academic Kids
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Periphrasis
Could you explain why, as languages evolve, future tenses are usually substituted by periphrasis? Fear of the irrealis?
- I'm not at all certain that there is a general rule that governs the replacement of future tenses. In western Romance, they seem to have been paraphrases at one time, but now are fully re-integrated, though their relationship to the infinitive and the verbs derived from habere are usually relatively transparent. The replacement of the Latin future with a paraphrase is likely to have been made necessary by phonetic changes in vulgar Latin, which made futures like amabit ambiguous to perfects like amavit. In Germanic, there isn't even a future tense per se in the Gothic language, so periphrasis is all we get.
- But they are not that stable. You have forms like "voy a {verb}" in Spanish or gonna in English.
- Elsewhere, there doesn't seem to be a trend to replacing them wholesale. In demotic Greek, the inherited future lives on. Don't know enough about Slavic to say, nor about non-Indo-European languages. -- Smerdis of Tlön 15:54, 27 Jan 2004 (UTC)
