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Latin has way more time tenses. such as present,past,future,perfect (and their subgroups such as plusquamperfectus,future perfect...) And as i german(We have that tenses) i can say,that these tenses change the view about that,what is said enormously,because they are describing different points in the time...
Loved the video! Please consider expanding this topic with exploring more languages that do or do not have a true future tense and if this also may be related to free will vs. determinism. Also, isn't it true that some languages including English underwent a "streamlining" process where inflections and word endings were eliminated from the language and how this might relate to the topic as well?
willan/will is vilja/vill in Swedish, and sculan/shall is skola/ska in Swedish. The difference is that in Swedish "vill" signals a desire, while "ska" signals intent. The distinction is clear-cut and unambiguous. With the logic expressed in this video, does ANY Germanic language have a future tense?
Alliterative This Video is wrong! English does have a future tense for example in these Sentences Past tense : He did his Schoolwork Present tense : He is doing his Schoolwork And now Future Tense: He will do his Schoolwork.
You didn't understand what the video is trying to explain. The will-future is constructed by an auxiliary verb, but not by a certain suffix of the main verb as in latin where the grammatical system is derived from. i.e: he did = faciebat ----> he does = facit ---> he will do = faciet
Here’s a funny anecdote: my sister went on a business trip to the Baltic. She is fluent in French, enough so that she has been an official court translator. She told me in amazement: “Estonian has no future tense!” I replied, “ Neither does English. Just think about it.” It is amusing that we don’t really notice the constructs of our own mother tongue, not unless we think about it.
Ha! That's great. And yes, that's exactly it, unless we sit down to study our own language we often know less about it formally than we do about second languages.
When you get right down to it, modern English doesn't really have a present tense as such either. We have a present progressive and a form that _looks_ like a present tense, but which is used as the habitual form of "real" verbs. Words that usually use the non-progressive present are only "verbs" by virtue of their grammatical changes - they are indicators of state and relationship rather than proper verbs. There is a sort of weird "narration mode" that still uses a present tense, whether that's a playwright or descriptive audio narrator describing the action, or kids at play doing the "my guy hits your guy" thing, meaning it's a real mode of language use and not some hangover literary tradition, but that's the only place where actual verbs have an actual present tense.
The way English uses auxiliaries (of 'to be') with a verb as in "I am going", "she is eating", "they are coming", is unique among Germanic languages. Welsh, decended from Brythonic, does a similar thing, except the 'to be' auxiliary comes first. It is thought that Old Welsh/Brythonic influenced early forms of English and that's why English uses 'to be' in this way and other Germanic languages do not.
I would argue that you can't talk about the future without expressing at least a bit of modality, since the future is not yet set in stone. What do we really mean when we talk about the future? Are we talking about what we want to happen? Are we talking about what we need to happen for some reason? Are we talking about what we're committed to make happen? Are we talking about what we're capable of making happen? Are we predicting the most likely consequence of certain present actions and conditions? Are we talking about something that we view as inevitable no matter what else happens? We can't talk about the future as though it were a simple fact like we can the past.
In fact in Romance languages, there's a tendency to use the future conjugation for say the weather forecast, but the equivalent of "going to" for definite things. But many Spanish speakers don't differentiate, so like spoken English strict rules are not observed.
fun fact: in slavic languages the future tense is also formed by the verb "to wish", although in most cases this verb has been truncated and transformed into a suffix -- the original idea is the same!
except for Russian lang. in russian the future is formed similarly to the past in other slavic langs (using the the modal verb "to be" in conjunction with a participle) which gives me an idea of an "unnatural" origin of russian lang.
It's how future tense is formed in Slovak, Polish, Czech... Not just Russian. And it's how it was formed in Old Bulgarian / Old Church Slavonic. So nothing unnatural there. It was South Slavic languages (Bulgarian, Serbian) that developed to use a form of "want" or "wish" to form their future tense, but this might well have been influenced by the non-Slavic languages they were in contact with. Even nowadays the grammar and word order of Bulgarian is closer to that of Romance languages than it is to other Slavic languages.
It is also possible to put Russian verbs in future tense by adding a prefix, as in "lubit' (infinitive) - lubit (3-rd person, present) - polubit (3-rd person, future tense). The construction with the modal verb "to be" and an infinitive ("budet lubit') is used when a continuous action is implied.
@@sillysad3198 Wow, thats rude. Ukranian and belorussian have the same grammar, don't you believe all of the eastern slavic lang are artificial. Russian was "created" by influence of Old church slavonik or old Bulgarian on east slavic dialects. The change was very slow and I can still read and somewhat understand 15th century writings. I have also met some old people from russian villages, they speak with a different accent but grammar is the same. If you are wondering, oldrussian or east slavic have lost most of the old tences in 11-13 century. Modern russian have completed past, imperfect past, present, perfect future and imperfect future. Ukranian and Belorussian have also a past perfect. In fact there was a dialect continuom in 19th century and you could walk from Moscow through Russian south into Ukraine past Lviv to Warsaw and every two neighbouring villages could understand each other. At last, you can't create a language and make people speak it. Just can't. Esperanto prove me wrong Idk why I wrote that he is probably a troll. Or stupid. Or both
As a French speaker from Quebec, I must say the way we use language to evoque and depict the future has been greatly influenced by English. French does have a « simple futur » tense, which is widely used on paper. But when speaking among ourselves, we rely heavily on the use of an auxilary + infinitive concerning the future (the auxillary being the conjugated verb « aller » (which means « to go »). Just as with English will + plus infinitive,this implies the possibility, rather than the absolute eventuality. Then we only use our simple future when a condition has been set for the action to happen. We could definitely say that ou simple future has more in common with the « shall + infinitive » English form. So interesting how surrounding cultures influence the way we formulate what we say and how we think of it.
TheAndronicus Spoken French French also frequently uses aller + infinitive instead of future tense. So too does Spanish, so this practice may date to Vulgar Latin.
I honestly was debating my friend yesterday on determinism vs free will... interestingly, she is Catholic and I was raised protestant. And not only was this video timely - but it also covered so many of my favorite topics. Awesome! Subbed.
Ever since I watched Keith Chen's TED talk, I've thought his "theory" is a giant heap of horse malarkey. It reminded me of these, and I consider them, old wives' tales that highly inflected languages are superior, thus making their speakers somehow smarter. Speakers shape languages, not the other way around. If Japan had never had highly hierarchical society for centuries, where impoliteness could've cost you your head, the modern language wouldn't have reflected this in such a way, needing to use honorifics on every level of relations. Same goes for the concept of tense or mood, it's irrelevant if a language expresses a certain concept lexically through adverbs or grammatically through inflection or a particle. The speaker using that language knows very well the timeframe and modality they are trying to convey, unless they deliberately want to deceive their listeners abusing ambiguity, present in the language. For instance take the languages of the Balkansprachbund which have renarrative grammatical moods. A speaker of such a language could deliberately abuse this feature of the language to lie to his audience, that they personally witnessed an event, which in reality was only related to them through someone else. Nevertheless I don't believe speakers of such languages are somehow naturally more suspicious to every information they receive. The language didn't come first, it is people who invented language, unless one believes in divine gifts lol.
There's a huge variation in people's ability to save for the future, it seems unlikely that such a diverse group of people would start with the same predilection for saving or not.
the derivative nature of the language in relation to our mind does not exclude the possibility of a feedback influence (of the language onto the mind). get real! the world is swarming with feedback loops.
It's certainly a controversial claim that would need strong evidence to back it up -- and his evidence does not appear to be as strong as he first said it was. And yes, the concept of strong linguistic determinism does not seem to have any support now; the idea of a weaker form of linguistic relativism, because it makes claims of a much milder effect, is also much harder to show experimentally, though there has been some intriguing work, which I'll be watching to see if it comes to anything!
I'd love if you did a video on the subjunctive in English, it's only barely there but it's something that's always interested me since I learnt it in Spanish.
Truth be told a minority of English native speakers use subjunctive voice well. The confusion caused in translation to daily English was very evident in feedback to the DuoLingo exercises on Spanish subjunctive.
This was an excellent video. I appreciate all your knowledge and information that you shared with us. It is hard to find books or online articles about the origins of the simple words (will, shall, be, etc...). Thus, this was very useful to me. Thanks so much!
Here's a summary: English does espress future tense but doesn't have grammaticalisation of the future tense. Instead, it divides time into past and non past forms, using paraphrasis to convey other tenses, aspects and moods. Go watch the series on language making by Biblaridion and Artifexian.
Good reflection on the grammatical history... though you may want to check your theology. Yes there was a debate between Luther and Erasmus. But you misrepresented Luther's and Lutheran's view on free will. You may want to read Luther's Bondage Bondage of The Will. Its a pretty awesome document! The way you represented Luther's view on the bondage of the will is much more aligned with Calvinism and reformed theology than the thoughts that Luther was attempting to express. Luther was responding to the issue of salvation, not about the simple day to day choices we make in life (this may be important to keep in mind). He was combating a heresy that was denounced long before the reformation called Pelagianism that arose in mid-evil catholicism as Semi-Pelagianism. Semi-Pelgianism is the belief you can chose to be saved. Luther's view simply put: you can not will yourself to be saved. Just like I did not will myself to be born. My mom and dad made that choice for me. But I can make the choice to end my life. I do have the choice to reject my salvation. To summarize Luther's view as determinism is simply incorrect.
Before the internet, many of us needed psychoactive hallucinations, often in rock concert or camping experiments. Now, I just watch your show. Take that GOT!
I always believed (because of how much I've heard it) that cool story about Szilard enlisting Einstein to send Roosevelt a letter starting the US on an atom bomb project. It was quite a surprise seeing some video of some one who saw the letter when it arrived at the Administration, and he indicated they already had people looking into this before the letter. Anything about it was secret of course, which required a reply to Szilard as if it was a new thought. It's true the scale was small and there was a long way to go before the project became large scale. It was when the British developed an alternative possibility vastly reducing the amount of scarce isotopes, and so the time scale to derive them, that the project quickly went unlimited, with the thought the Germans could have scooped us on this better idea.
We did talk about Arrival and the linguistics of time in a podcast episode: ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-6etGYNcIjz4.html. It's certainly connected!
Mussolini didn't actually get the trains running on time, they ran preety much the same punctuality during his rule as before. And during the war there were obviously lots of problems with train reliability. Edit: Just in the unlikely case that anyone every sees this again. My source for this was the really good book 'Modern Italy: A Political History' by Denis Mack Smith, he talks about it in his chapter on Mussolini and Fascism.
+Mick Mickymick Yes, it’s a cliche, not reality. But a preoccupation with mechanisation and speed does seem to be noticeable in fascism, which the cliche highlights.
In my dealings with fascists, (mostly on the internet it has to be said), I find it's more like an obsession with the status quo and with authority rather than a fascination with speed or mechanisation. Not that I'm disputing your orignal point, the Futurists certainly had that fascination.
Fair point, I should perhaps have said "fascists at that time". I don't think it's integral to fascism, just part of the way it was expressed then. And thanks for the book reference, always useful to have pointers to good sources.
Related to the question of whether the past and the future actually exist, or whether they are just phenomena of the present, is the question of whether a person at time A is actually the same person at some later (or previous) time B. This has occurred to me in thinking about the following ethical comparison. A Canadian A (pardon the pun) cannot pre-authorize his own assisted death in the case that he becomes demented, becuase, presumably, the future demented version of A is a a different person who might make a different decision. What if a criminal in jail becomes demented: is he similarly not the same person, and hence should be released?
A fascinating question... a related one is explored in this video that may make you never want to sleep again... :) ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-nQHBAdShgYI.html
Criminal cases have been heard revolving around that question, for example that of Alvin Bernard Ford in Florida, decided by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1986. Ford had been convicted of murder in 1974, but became paranoid schizophrenic while in prison on death row. SCOTUS found that it was unconstitutional to execute the insane, under the Eighth Amendment (...cruel or unusual punishment...) and that executing the insane serves no penological purpose. He was transferred to the Florida State Hospital. In 1989 he was found to have become sane, and therefore could be executed, but while his appeal was going on, he died. There was another case more recently, of Vernon Madison, in Alabama, who murdered a police officer in 1989, and was sentenced to die, but had become demented while in prison to such a degree that he could not remember the crime. SCOTUS in January of this year (2018) delayed the execution so that the case could be reviewed further. It seems to me that the same things would apply, but I'm not an expert.
7:25 Since we can't know the future or guarantee that something will happen, how is it possible to have what you call a future tense instead of a expectation/prediction?
Great video! Are you sure “ought” is a modal verb? “I ought to go” for example, but “I must go,” “I can go,” “I will go,” etc. - I regarded the modal verbs as the ones which cause the infinitive to drop the “to”.
Ah, you’re right! I definitely shouldn’t have used “ought” as an example, because it’s a weird edge-case. It’s sometimes lumped in with the modals, but it’s better described as a semi-modal, in that it has some of the properties of the modals, but not all. As you point out it usually takes a to-infinitive, but not when it’s negated. So “I ought to go” but “I ought not go”. There are some other verbs like this, such as “need”, as in “I need to go” but “I need not go”. “Need” can take do-support, which would be the more normal way of saying this in contemporary English, as in “I don’t need to go”, but note you can’t do this with “ought”. You can’t say “I don’t ought to go”, and this is something it has in common with full modals. You can’t say “I don’t should go”, for instance. The funny thing is, I didn’t slip on this because I was trying to make some esoteric point about semi-modals. I should have just used the clearest examples and not further complicated things. I made the mistake because I was thinking in Old English, in which “agan” can be used as a modal auxiliary. The past tense of “agan”, “ahte”, gives us Modern English “ought”. The present tense of “agan” gives us Modern English “owe”, and “owe” and “ought” have become separate verbs now (though apparently as late as the 18th century you could say “he ought me five pounds”). I’ve been spending so much time looking at Old English verbs, I’m starting to actually think in Old English! Better get myself “back to the future”! ;-) Thanks for pointing this out.
Alliterative Thank you for your generous response! You are clearly very well informed on the subject, better than I, and I apologize for nitpicking. I am also a fan of OE though Old Norse has been my latest passion, when I’m not posting Latin language pronunciation videos. Keep up the great work, sir! I’m glad a linguist of your caliber is offering such great info.
No apology necessary! You were quite right, and I was actually genuinely amused when I realised why I'd made the (sort of) error, so I'm glad you pointed it out! And thank you very much for your kind words.
I would love to know your thoughts on the "going to" construction for the future tense. For example, consider the following. "I am going to walk the dog this evening."
It developed during the Middle English period (I searched when working on my PhD and could find no examples in Old English). It developed from the idea of going to a place to do something and then the idea of motion gradually faded. I always intended to go back and do a full study of future constructions in Middle English, but never got around to it.
Isn't the theory about Latin future tense that it wasn't directly inherited from proto-Indo-European but was a later development with the Italic branch of PIE. Linguists think it was from the addition of a suffix which had earlier been word itself. It is interesting to note that as I was learning Spanish the future tense shows a hint of this word-suffix addition to make the future tense. The conjugation of haber (there is/are): he, has, ha, hemos, habéis, han are attached to (or at least appear to be) the infinitive of a verb. So hablar (to speak) would conjugate hablaré, hablarás, hablará, etc. Whether this is a direct development from the Latin future or a later Spanish self- development, I don't know.
I put the link on my FB ...thanks to YT this kind of video's are now easy available for everyone...YT has a lot of less interested material, but those video's helps everybody to develop themself for free....on the moment they have free time.. is great: the video's as well as the comments...I still have to learn a lot...love it..
I always had this thought of not having any future tense since I was a kid and I was "dude I'm just over-thinking that's it" but I when I searched about it on google I was really surprised that I was always correct about it and I was like dude I'm outta those 5% people who think differently. 😊
I like how you research about all of these words that were created so many years ago, but i have a question: How did the creators of these words introduce said words to society? Do they tell everyone about the word and it's meaning and then everyone just starts using it, or was it a family thing that became a neighborhood thing and then became an actual word?
The connection between early Futurism and Mussolini is interesting. Nowadays, American Futurism also promotes a libertarian tyranny of sorts, in which unexamined technical change is presumed to be a virtue in itself. For example, Uber's freedom to test its self-driving cars on public streets is assumed to be a good (advance the technology) regardless of the reality (Uber wishes to cut costs by firing its human drivers while the public shoulders part of the expensive of its research (a cost the woman recently killed by a Uber car paid) for a company that intends to keep all of its profits (no obligation to the public good). Ergo, we believe "Futurism" has an innate right to "charge us" without us asking anything in return (other than the vague promise of future convenience that we will have to pay an additional price for (Uber won't provide its service free).
Mark, is there really a present? Everything we perceive is in the past by the time we've recognized it. And as time is relative-- wow, this gets way knotty the more we unravel it....
One possibility for how Germanic languages lost the future tense is that proto-Germanic came into contact with another language in the Baltic region that either had no future tense or had an incompatible one.
But you can express the future without special verb endings. It's very common even today in German to say some like "Later I go to shop". In general there's a general move in European languages away from cases, declinations and complicated conjugations to using prepositions and auxiliary verbs.
... if I use words to convey to my interlocutor something that has not yet happened then I am using the future tense ... language is a means of communication not some arcane academic debate as to what is and what isn't
That would technically be a tense, but it isn't grammaticalised onto the verb, so you use what's called paraphrasis (using helper words to express other grammatical features)
"My destiny is to go to heaven". This sentence uses words to convey to a interlocutor something that has not yet happened. Is it using the future tense?
I watched this now and wrote this now and see it again now that I have come back to look at it now and when someone has responded to it I am seeing that now. What are you seeing now?
I don't know much about Erasmus, except that "the wisdom and sagacity of Erasmus will not be questioned," according to Thomas James Matthias. Matthias anonymously published a volume of political satire in Ireland in 1797, in which he included an introductory note recounting an anecdote about Julius Scaliger's oration against the famous tract by Erasmus called Ciceronianus, which Erasmus took to be the work of Hieronymus Aleander. "Yet he was Mistaken ENTIRELY." Matthias recommended the anecdote "to sagacious persons" as a warning against ascribing his work "to men, all equally guiltless of my labours, and all equally ignorant of my intentions."
there is no future tense for a simple reason: it does NOT affect your ability of planning your future. whether the sapire-worf hypothesis is true or not, you do plan your future IN THE PRESENT.
To elaborate on that, consider that different languages make different ideas easier to express, which in turn makes those ideas more accesible. Then those ideas by being accesible facilitate to express other ideas in terms of them. And yes, those would be programming languages, yet I fail to see how the same logic could not apply here... although, that just speaks of my way of thinking. Which goes to show that what we know influences how we think, and there is no reason why language is an exception.
Just remember that languages only lightly influence people's thoughts. Languages are never solely responsible for thought. I mean, if strong Whorfianism or linguistic determinism, that is, language determines one's thoughts, were true, then how could anyone think to invent something new which didn't already exist, and for which a word didn't already exist? For instance, how could anyone think of and describe UNIVAC if it didn't already exist? Languages do color our thoughts, and we are restricted by the words we know, but our word choices do not prevent us from thinking about things, nor from describing our observations. Language is merely an ever-changing tool which aids us in expressing our thoughts; a tool which we thought about before its existence.
Seemed to be a bit too heavy on the "connections" at the expense of the etymology and linguistics. By halfway my brain was oozing through my ears. Should remind you that the last person who tried this Connections malarkey, James Burke (see his 1978 TV series), went slightly batty.
Think about the TV series Connections, and its spawn. If you haven't seen any of that show, then check out Connections (TV series) on Wikipedia for some information.
All this stuff has nothing to do with the question (linguistical) whether English does have a future tense or not. And actually it does not have a real future tense, it has tensal markers.
A quick answer of the question of this video is that English does and does not have a future tense. More specifically, English, like many other languages, does not have a specific morphological future tense on the verbs, but English, like all languages, can still describe and indicate future events.
Alliterative This Video is wrong! English does have a future tense for example in these Sentences Past tense : He did his Schoolwork Present tense : He is doing his Schoolwork And now Future Tense: He will do his Schoolwork.
Tut tut sir, spreading misinformation. The atomic bombs did not even effect the war Germany, save sapping needed resources, and it was mostly the Soviet invasion that ended Japan ambitions, hard to go down in a blaze of glory against your foes, if you're an irradiated husk defending poisonous rubble against people that made your own unit 731 seem tame
I'm tempted to give this video a thumbs down, despite it being a good video. Several statements about Erasamus and Luther are misleading. Plus, the video rambled for several minutes after it (sort of) answered the question in the title.
Most English speakers pronounce "whales" like "Wales", those are also totally not the same thing. People have different dialects and accents, don't be a dumbass
Of course English doesn't have one future tense, it has several including future perfect and use of the present continuous, as well as indefinite usages of verbs apparently in past conjugation referring to the future. The subtleties of which tax English students. If grammarians make pedantic claims based on definitions,l founded based on the study of Latin, it's the definitions which are faulty they don't make ridiculous statements true. Human languages overload words and have ambiguous grammars, uniqueness is not required. Try looking up meanings of "get".
