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From: riddle@ut-sally.UUCP (Prentiss Riddle)
Newsgroups: net.nlang
Subject: Re: Re: Tenses and aspects in English and its relatives
Message-ID: <259@ut-sally.UUCP>
Date: Fri, 28-Oct-83 12:07:10 EST
Article-I.D.: ut-sally.259
Posted: Fri Oct 28 12:07:10 1983
Date-Received: Mon, 31-Oct-83 22:19:36 EST
Organization: U. Texas CS Dept., Austin, Texas
Lines: 36

I think that the German and English ways of dealing with the future are
more similar than people realize.  German has two different means of
expressing the future, one a bit colloquial and imprecise, the other a
bit more formal and exact:

    Morgen gehe ich nach Hause.
    ("I go home tomorrow.")

    Morgen werde ich nach Hause gehen.
    ("I will/shall go home tomorrow.")

I maintain that the kind of English I speak makes exactly this distinction:

    I'm going home tomorrow.

    I'll go home tomorrow.

The confusion has to do with the fact that English makes a separate distinc-
tion that German does not, between "I'm going" and "I go".  Although you'll
see the latter labelled as "present tense" in a lot of archaic grammars of
English, in fact it expresses habitual action and has nothing to do with
tense.  When we truly want to express present tense, we say "I'm going,"
and we frequently use this present tense form to express the future, just as
the Germans do, by throwing in a word like "tomorrow" to make things clear.

Of course, English does have a third form of expressing future tense which
German lacks, but Spanish has:

    I'm going to go home tomorrow.

Are there any native speakers of German on the net who'd care to comment?
----
Prentiss Riddle
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