Re: where do so many tenses come from?

Ruud Harmsen wrote:
Sun, 26 Mar 2006 23:37:39 -0800: "Alexei A. Frounze"
<alexfru@xxxxxxx>: in sci.lang:

Spanish has more complicated imperative (mostly conjugation is
different) and subjunctive.

The polite imperative is identical with the subjunctive (conjunctive),
except that the informal imperative is identical with the third person
present. What's complicated about that?

There're a number of verbs whose imperative is neither present nor subjunctive in form, e.g.:
di, haz, hé, pon, sé, ten, val, ve, ven. I don't know if it's just these verbs (decir, hacer, etc) and derivatives from them (e.g. bendecir) or there're others that have individual imperative form.

That's a good point. However, if I think along it, the future will be
missing from the tenses as it's always made up of the verb to be
(I'm not mentioning "going to do something sometime" and "be doing
something sometime", which also involve additional verbs). I can't
imagine people living without thinking of the future and without any
plans about it whatsoever.

Not having direct grammatical means to express something doesn't mean
it cannot be expressed. Most languages can probably say tomorrow, next
week, in a year of so, in the future, etc. even there is no future
tense. Or if there is one, like in Dutch, but it is rarely used to
express things in the future, but rather for contingency.

Well, yes, most languages have all of those time points and periods, why then complicate tenses instead of saying when something happened or will happen?
It was a great example about some rare languages with about 5 past tenses differentiating only the point/period in the past (now, yesterday, recently, long time ago, long time ago before speaker's birth or first rememberings). Russian doesn't have that many tenses. If it's now/yesterday/recently/tomorrow/soon/whatever and it's important to note the time or to make it unambiguous, it's done explicitly by adding that now/yesterday/recently/tomorrow/soon/whatever.

So, if I take off English all tenses formed w/o the auxiliary verbs to be and to have, then all I have for the past, present and future is simple past and simple present. There's no future. In this limited set of tenses to talk about the future one probably needs to use present simple (past simple would be odd) with additional specification of the time in future (e.g. tomorrow). While that is certainly possible, that way is nonuniform. Is that because people tend to talk about the future less than about the present and past or is that because of something else?

Interestingly, Russian also uses the auxiliary verb to be to form the future tense, but it's used to form only continuous/incomplete/imperfect future actions, whereas completed future actions just use an altered/conjugated form of the main verb. I guess this is something ancient as well as gender-specific verb endings in the past tenses -- they're only there, in the past. I also don't know why or how that appeared.

Alex

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