6 ms·

Japanese is a language with no future tense and a very choppy system of plurals (many of which have to be inferred). I don't think it's a good candidate.

wl 4y ago
English lacking a future tense hasn't stopped it from becoming the international language.
- thfuran 4y ago
  What? English has several future tenses: I will go I will be going I will have gone I will have been going
  - dorchadas 4y ago
    There's an argument to be made that that isn't a true future tense, as it's not an inflected verb form. Thus English doesn't have a future tense in the same way it has a past tense (-ed for regular verbs) or a present tense (-s for third person singular verbs), .i. marked by inflection of a verb. Instead, it uses an auxiliary verb to express the future. Now, whether that counts as 'tense' or not is a matter for linguistic debate.
    - vgel 4y ago
      This is my syntax bias for sure, and you're not wrong it is a debate for some reason, but I find it very silly. An inflectional rule or an auxiliary word can assign a `TENSE fut` feature, just like an inflectional ending or an adposition can assign a case feature. They're just different mechanisms.
      - msbarnett 4y ago
        Yeah, but we're just trying to be consistent: when people say "Japanese has no future tense", they mean a morphological tense, and it's equally true that English has no morphological future tense either. Both languages, of course, still have other mechanisms for doing this, either via specifying the point in time "She's buying that tomorrow", or via auxillary words (is going to buy, kaeru tsumori desu).
        vgel 4y ago
        Eh, you're right if you treat it as just clipping "morphological". But it doesn't sound like it to most people, they think "English and Japanese are in the same category of lacking a future tense" in some non-extremely-limited way. When really English is far closer to a language with morphological future tense than it is to Japanese. Here's what I mean: 1. Go to this link: http://erg.delph-in.net/logon http://erg.delph-in.net/logon . 2. Type in "I will go to the store" and check "mrs" in the output list. 3. Click "Analyze" 4. In the MRS (right pane), under "go_v_1", hover over the "e3" of the "ARG0 e3" line. 5. You'll see "TENSE fut" in the feature box. That's the result of a symbolic, machine grammar, not a machine-learning system. A rules-based system was able to determine that the verb is future tense (based on a syntactic rule that unifies in the future tense based on the presence of the auxiliary). If aliens came by and zapped every English speaker's brain so that we all started using "I gowill to the store and buywill some fruits" instead of an auxiliary, that would be a simple adjustment to that grammar (delete the old syntax rule, add a will-lex rule to strip the suffix and apply the same feature to the verb). If, then, another set of aliens came and zapped our brains again, deleting all memory of the concept of "will X" from our heads, that would be different. In the presence of the sentence "I go to the store tomorrow" or "I write code next year", there's no way for any symbolic grammar to handle all the possible ways you can contextually refer to the future. That's solely the domain of ML systems (and all their faults), at least as far as I know. ------- By analogy, the way people talk about English future tense is like if people said "Python doesn't have closures with more than one statement", and when questioned "Well inline function definitions in Python have closure", they responded "Well of course I meant 'Python doesn't have expression closures with more than one statement'". Like sure, it's true and even a valid clipping to make in a certain context, but as it spreads as a meme people who don't know the context get the wrong idea.
        msbarnett 4y ago
        > When really English is far closer to a language with morphological future tense than it is to Japanese. I really don’t agree, as a speaker of both languages. There’s a lot of western-exceptionalism invested in the notion that Japanese somehow has an exceptional paucity of ability to express future events that’s categorically different than English, when in reality the situations are quite quite close to one another. It’s not that English doesn’t have a future tense in a casual/non-strictly-morphological sense of “tense” — it’s that by that casual definition really Japanese is in almost the same boat, and we should stop playing this “invent arbitrary ways to claim the inscrutable Japanese mind speaks without the ability to use a future tense but English is different because I Say So” game.
  - wl 4y ago
    go = infinitive going = present gone = preterite No future tense there. You're using "will" as an auxiliary verb to talk about the future. It accomplishes the same thing as a present tense, but it is not the same thing.
    - inkyoto 4y ago
      > going = present > gone = preterite «going» is not «present», and «gone» is not «preterite». They are present and past participles, respectively, that can be used to form present and past tenses in English, and they can be both used as adjectives which signifies the fact that they are the true participles. Present and past participles are a common distinctive feature of Indo-European languages, and their use to form specific aspects of the present and past tenses in English is a common feature across Germanic languages.
      - wl 4y ago
        3/4 examples given were participles, so that's what I dealt with. The fact remains there's no future participles in English.
        inkyoto 4y ago
        Ah, yes, you are correct. I got temporarily transfixed on something else. None of the Indo-European languages (to the best of my knowledge) have future participles due to none of them having a true morphological future tense. Therefore, there future participles are not possible. Future tense, depending on the exact language, is expressed in Indo-European languages either with the use of an auxiliary or a modal verb or with the use of a perfective aspect of the present tense. Esperanto is the only language that does have the future participles, but that is another bedtime story.
      - kergonath 4y ago
        > Present and past participles are a common distinctive feature of Indo-European languages, and their use to form specific aspects of the present and past tenses in English is a common feature across Germanic languages. They are used in Romance languages as well. Half the tenses in French are auxiliary+participle combinations (Latin even has future participles).
  - ghaff 4y ago
    English has basically most (all?) the tenses that a language like French has but may lean on pairing the verb with additional words. (Though it's been way too long since I studied French to even remember the names for all these tenses much less the French forms.)
    - fvdessen 4y ago
      french has a lot more tenses, behold: avoir, tu avais, tu as eu, tu as, tu auras, tu auras eu, tu aurais, tu aurais eu, tu eus, tu eus eu, que tu aies, que tu aies eu, que tu eusses, que tu eusses eu, aie, aie eu
      - ghaff 4y ago
        How many of them express concepts that you actually can't express in other ways in English?
        fvdessen 4y ago
        Some of them have mostly the same meaning as others but are only used in written form to express that you feel really intellectually superior to your audience. Such levels of snobbery do not translate to english.
        CRConrad 4y ago
        > Such levels of snobbery do not translate to english. Muahahahaa, good one!
        kergonath 4y ago
        There are very few things that you really cannot express in one language. Usually there are work around a using specific phrases or prepositions. Both French and English are more or less complete in that sense. For example, in French j’irai (I will go) and je serai allé (I will have gone) are two different tenses. Sure, you can express both meanings in English, but French has a specific tense for “things that will have happened at some point in the future” (and many other besides). On the other hand, English has continuous tenses, which cannot be expressed with just a tense in French: /I am going/ (je suis en train de partir) vs /I go/ (je vais). Both languages can express both concepts, but they have different shortcuts.
  - plorkyeran 4y ago
    English uses an auxiliary word (will) to express things happening in the future rather than having a distinct future tense.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - Veen 4y ago
    When people say English doesn't have a future tense, they mean it doesn't have an inflectional future tense like other languages. It uses modal auxiliaries instead, as in your examples. Compare "I walked" (inflection) with the simple future "I will walk" ("will" as a modal auxiliary).
  - retrac 4y ago
    Many descriptions of future events can use the present tense. For example: "He's fixing that tomorrow." If English has a distinct future tense, that should sound just as wrong as "He fixed that tomorrow" does. But it doesn't. This suggests the future tense in English is marginal, and constructed optionally, out of verbs and verb modifiers that are fundamentally expressed in the present tense.
  - FabHK 4y ago
    You forgot: I'm going to go I'm going to be going (?) I'm going to have gone (??) I'm going to have been going (??)
    - SilasX 4y ago
      Heh, I sometimes think that in 30 years, “to be gonna” will be the “official” future tense helper verb.
      - thfuran 4y ago
        I'm gonna of gone?
  - yongjik 4y ago
    Disclaimer: IANAL(inguist). Unlike school grammar, most linguists consider English tense as just present and past, or "non-past" and "past", to be precise. There are several arguments for that: * The auxiliary verbs "will" and "shall" don't behave like present/past tense markers ("-ed"), but behave more like "can", "may", "must", etc., which are grouped as verbs affecting modality. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modal_verb https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modal_verb * More importantly, you can actually take the past tense of "will"! > He would frequently go out for dinner. Hard to tell what's its tense, if "will" marked the future tense. It's much cleaner to consider it as a past tense of the modal verb "will". * English does use present tense in many cases to denote an event in the future, e.g., "We depart at five a.m. tomorrow," or "When does it start today?" Contrast this with the past tense, where nobody says "We depart at five a.m. yesterday," or "When does it start last evening?"
    - Tainnor 4y ago
      That just shows that English doesn't have an inflectional future, it doesn't show that it has no future tense. A tense being marked by a modal verb is not uncommon at all, German marks the future by means of the verb "werden", and French and Spanish also have an additional future (next to the inflectional one) using the auxiliary "to go" (e.g. "voy a comer"). The fact that future tense is not obligatory is also not an indication that it doesn't exist (again, it's the same situation as in German). Compare the sentence pair: "Every day at 6, I eat dinner" "Every day at 6, I will eat dinner" They have clearly different meanings, the second referring to something that will only start to happen in the future (which is why it's a bit hard to imagine a context in which the utterance makes sense). The first one refers to a habitual action that extends at least to the present moment.
    - int_19h 4y ago
      > Hard to tell what's its tense, if "will" marked the future tense. It's much cleaner to consider it as a past tense of the modal verb "will". FWIW, when I learned English (as a foreign language) in school, this use of "would" would be referred to as future-in-the-past, and considered a distinct tense, along with present, past, and future.
  - jcranmer 4y ago
    In a strict linguistic sense, these are not tenses, they are... aspects, I think. In practice, you can lump tense, aspect, and mood together and call them all "tenses." Especially because many languages can end up partially conflating them, insisting on a formal dichotomy based on the specific information being conveyed in verb forms or based on how it is grammatically represented (inflection versus modal verbs versus what have you).
  - School-Cotton 4y ago
    Those are semantically future but not syntactically so.
  - msbarnett 4y ago
    Those are modal auxiliaries. If English had a true future morphological tense, there would be some inflection to the word "go" itself that would mean "go-but-in-the-future"
muffinman26 4y ago
Not having a future tense is an advantage, not a disadvantage. There's no reason that something happening in the future needs to be encoded with weird grammar/verb conjugation. It's simpler to denote something happening in the future with a phrase describing when it happens, which often needs to be included anyway. Fewer tenses means less to learn. 'I go tomorrow' vs. 'I will go tomorrow' 'I go later' vs. 'I will go later' Note that I don't speak Japanese. I'm basing this off of my very limited understanding of how Mandarin denotes the future. It's very possible I misunderstood what you mean by "no future tense".

wl 4y ago

English lacking a future tense hasn't stopped it from becoming the international language.

thfuran 4y ago
What? English has several future tenses: I will go I will be going I will have gone I will have been going
- dorchadas 4y ago
  There's an argument to be made that that isn't a true future tense, as it's not an inflected verb form. Thus English doesn't have a future tense in the same way it has a past tense (-ed for regular verbs) or a present tense (-s for third person singular verbs), .i. marked by inflection of a verb. Instead, it uses an auxiliary verb to express the future. Now, whether that counts as 'tense' or not is a matter for linguistic debate.
  - vgel 4y ago
    This is my syntax bias for sure, and you're not wrong it is a debate for some reason, but I find it very silly. An inflectional rule or an auxiliary word can assign a `TENSE fut` feature, just like an inflectional ending or an adposition can assign a case feature. They're just different mechanisms.
    - msbarnett 4y ago
      Yeah, but we're just trying to be consistent: when people say "Japanese has no future tense", they mean a morphological tense, and it's equally true that English has no morphological future tense either. Both languages, of course, still have other mechanisms for doing this, either via specifying the point in time "She's buying that tomorrow", or via auxillary words (is going to buy, kaeru tsumori desu).
      - vgel 4y ago
        Eh, you're right if you treat it as just clipping "morphological". But it doesn't sound like it to most people, they think "English and Japanese are in the same category of lacking a future tense" in some non-extremely-limited way. When really English is far closer to a language with morphological future tense than it is to Japanese. Here's what I mean: 1. Go to this link: http://erg.delph-in.net/logon http://erg.delph-in.net/logon . 2. Type in "I will go to the store" and check "mrs" in the output list. 3. Click "Analyze" 4. In the MRS (right pane), under "go_v_1", hover over the "e3" of the "ARG0 e3" line. 5. You'll see "TENSE fut" in the feature box. That's the result of a symbolic, machine grammar, not a machine-learning system. A rules-based system was able to determine that the verb is future tense (based on a syntactic rule that unifies in the future tense based on the presence of the auxiliary). If aliens came by and zapped every English speaker's brain so that we all started using "I gowill to the store and buywill some fruits" instead of an auxiliary, that would be a simple adjustment to that grammar (delete the old syntax rule, add a will-lex rule to strip the suffix and apply the same feature to the verb). If, then, another set of aliens came and zapped our brains again, deleting all memory of the concept of "will X" from our heads, that would be different. In the presence of the sentence "I go to the store tomorrow" or "I write code next year", there's no way for any symbolic grammar to handle all the possible ways you can contextually refer to the future. That's solely the domain of ML systems (and all their faults), at least as far as I know. ------- By analogy, the way people talk about English future tense is like if people said "Python doesn't have closures with more than one statement", and when questioned "Well inline function definitions in Python have closure", they responded "Well of course I meant 'Python doesn't have expression closures with more than one statement'". Like sure, it's true and even a valid clipping to make in a certain context, but as it spreads as a meme people who don't know the context get the wrong idea.
        msbarnett 4y ago
        > When really English is far closer to a language with morphological future tense than it is to Japanese. I really don’t agree, as a speaker of both languages. There’s a lot of western-exceptionalism invested in the notion that Japanese somehow has an exceptional paucity of ability to express future events that’s categorically different than English, when in reality the situations are quite quite close to one another. It’s not that English doesn’t have a future tense in a casual/non-strictly-morphological sense of “tense” — it’s that by that casual definition really Japanese is in almost the same boat, and we should stop playing this “invent arbitrary ways to claim the inscrutable Japanese mind speaks without the ability to use a future tense but English is different because I Say So” game.
- wl 4y ago
  go = infinitive going = present gone = preterite No future tense there. You're using "will" as an auxiliary verb to talk about the future. It accomplishes the same thing as a present tense, but it is not the same thing.
  - inkyoto 4y ago
    > going = present > gone = preterite «going» is not «present», and «gone» is not «preterite». They are present and past participles, respectively, that can be used to form present and past tenses in English, and they can be both used as adjectives which signifies the fact that they are the true participles. Present and past participles are a common distinctive feature of Indo-European languages, and their use to form specific aspects of the present and past tenses in English is a common feature across Germanic languages.
    - wl 4y ago
      3/4 examples given were participles, so that's what I dealt with. The fact remains there's no future participles in English.
      - inkyoto 4y ago
        Ah, yes, you are correct. I got temporarily transfixed on something else. None of the Indo-European languages (to the best of my knowledge) have future participles due to none of them having a true morphological future tense. Therefore, there future participles are not possible. Future tense, depending on the exact language, is expressed in Indo-European languages either with the use of an auxiliary or a modal verb or with the use of a perfective aspect of the present tense. Esperanto is the only language that does have the future participles, but that is another bedtime story.
    - kergonath 4y ago
      > Present and past participles are a common distinctive feature of Indo-European languages, and their use to form specific aspects of the present and past tenses in English is a common feature across Germanic languages. They are used in Romance languages as well. Half the tenses in French are auxiliary+participle combinations (Latin even has future participles).
- ghaff 4y ago
  English has basically most (all?) the tenses that a language like French has but may lean on pairing the verb with additional words. (Though it's been way too long since I studied French to even remember the names for all these tenses much less the French forms.)
  - fvdessen 4y ago
    french has a lot more tenses, behold: avoir, tu avais, tu as eu, tu as, tu auras, tu auras eu, tu aurais, tu aurais eu, tu eus, tu eus eu, que tu aies, que tu aies eu, que tu eusses, que tu eusses eu, aie, aie eu
    - ghaff 4y ago
      How many of them express concepts that you actually can't express in other ways in English?
      - fvdessen 4y ago
        Some of them have mostly the same meaning as others but are only used in written form to express that you feel really intellectually superior to your audience. Such levels of snobbery do not translate to english.
        CRConrad 4y ago
        > Such levels of snobbery do not translate to english. Muahahahaa, good one!
      - kergonath 4y ago
        There are very few things that you really cannot express in one language. Usually there are work around a using specific phrases or prepositions. Both French and English are more or less complete in that sense. For example, in French j’irai (I will go) and je serai allé (I will have gone) are two different tenses. Sure, you can express both meanings in English, but French has a specific tense for “things that will have happened at some point in the future” (and many other besides). On the other hand, English has continuous tenses, which cannot be expressed with just a tense in French: /I am going/ (je suis en train de partir) vs /I go/ (je vais). Both languages can express both concepts, but they have different shortcuts.
- plorkyeran 4y ago
  English uses an auxiliary word (will) to express things happening in the future rather than having a distinct future tense.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- Veen 4y ago
  When people say English doesn't have a future tense, they mean it doesn't have an inflectional future tense like other languages. It uses modal auxiliaries instead, as in your examples. Compare "I walked" (inflection) with the simple future "I will walk" ("will" as a modal auxiliary).
- retrac 4y ago
  Many descriptions of future events can use the present tense. For example: "He's fixing that tomorrow." If English has a distinct future tense, that should sound just as wrong as "He fixed that tomorrow" does. But it doesn't. This suggests the future tense in English is marginal, and constructed optionally, out of verbs and verb modifiers that are fundamentally expressed in the present tense.
- FabHK 4y ago
  You forgot: I'm going to go I'm going to be going (?) I'm going to have gone (??) I'm going to have been going (??)
  - SilasX 4y ago
    Heh, I sometimes think that in 30 years, “to be gonna” will be the “official” future tense helper verb.
    - thfuran 4y ago
      I'm gonna of gone?
- yongjik 4y ago
  Disclaimer: IANAL(inguist). Unlike school grammar, most linguists consider English tense as just present and past, or "non-past" and "past", to be precise. There are several arguments for that: * The auxiliary verbs "will" and "shall" don't behave like present/past tense markers ("-ed"), but behave more like "can", "may", "must", etc., which are grouped as verbs affecting modality. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modal_verb https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modal_verb * More importantly, you can actually take the past tense of "will"! > He would frequently go out for dinner. Hard to tell what's its tense, if "will" marked the future tense. It's much cleaner to consider it as a past tense of the modal verb "will". * English does use present tense in many cases to denote an event in the future, e.g., "We depart at five a.m. tomorrow," or "When does it start today?" Contrast this with the past tense, where nobody says "We depart at five a.m. yesterday," or "When does it start last evening?"
  - Tainnor 4y ago
    That just shows that English doesn't have an inflectional future, it doesn't show that it has no future tense. A tense being marked by a modal verb is not uncommon at all, German marks the future by means of the verb "werden", and French and Spanish also have an additional future (next to the inflectional one) using the auxiliary "to go" (e.g. "voy a comer"). The fact that future tense is not obligatory is also not an indication that it doesn't exist (again, it's the same situation as in German). Compare the sentence pair: "Every day at 6, I eat dinner" "Every day at 6, I will eat dinner" They have clearly different meanings, the second referring to something that will only start to happen in the future (which is why it's a bit hard to imagine a context in which the utterance makes sense). The first one refers to a habitual action that extends at least to the present moment.
  - int_19h 4y ago
    > Hard to tell what's its tense, if "will" marked the future tense. It's much cleaner to consider it as a past tense of the modal verb "will". FWIW, when I learned English (as a foreign language) in school, this use of "would" would be referred to as future-in-the-past, and considered a distinct tense, along with present, past, and future.
- jcranmer 4y ago
  In a strict linguistic sense, these are not tenses, they are... aspects, I think. In practice, you can lump tense, aspect, and mood together and call them all "tenses." Especially because many languages can end up partially conflating them, insisting on a formal dichotomy based on the specific information being conveyed in verb forms or based on how it is grammatically represented (inflection versus modal verbs versus what have you).
- School-Cotton 4y ago
  Those are semantically future but not syntactically so.
- msbarnett 4y ago
  Those are modal auxiliaries. If English had a true future morphological tense, there would be some inflection to the word "go" itself that would mean "go-but-in-the-future"

muffinman26 4y ago

Not having a future tense is an advantage, not a disadvantage. There's no reason that something happening in the future needs to be encoded with weird grammar/verb conjugation. It's simpler to denote something happening in the future with a phrase describing when it happens, which often needs to be included anyway. Fewer tenses means less to learn. 'I go tomorrow' vs. 'I will go tomorrow' 'I go later' vs. 'I will go later' Note that I don't speak Japanese. I'm basing this off of my very limited understanding of how Mandarin denotes the future. It's very possible I misunderstood what you mean by "no future tense".