English Doesn't Have a Future Tense
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 19 ม.ค. 2024
- English is a two-tense language.
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Leeuwe van den Heuvel - Dutch
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this is freaking me out i barely understand what this means, honestly i never understood grammar analytically or anything i just get language intuitively i gotta just speak to people man i fucking hate this nerd shit. still couldnt tell you what an adverb is
you don't know what an adverb is because adverbs aren't a real category in themselves, it's just the name we give to anything that isn't a noun/verb/adjective/adposition.
You don't really need to understand grammar to speak your first language, as you can see how you are able to formulate the whole English sentence above without any grammar knowledge. But if you're intending to broaden your horizon and learn a second language, grammar will help you go a long way.
Learning languages is cool and a lot of fun! Even if you think it's nerdy, what's wrong with being nerdy? It might be scary to learn something new, but I encourage you to step out of your comfort zone and learn stuff!
@@Sonnen_Licht i've got entry level understanding of greek, french, spanish, mandarin and italian but its brutal getting to fluency i dont see it happening for me unless i live somewhere where its a national language
basically, english has "walk/walked/will walk"
every verb changes based on if its in the past tense or not in the past tense. take, for example, "to walk." in the non past tense its "walk" while in the past tense its "walked" with the -ed suffix
and the verb stays the same if its the present or future "(will) walk" and since the "will" part is not glued onto the verb itself, it does not make english have a future tense and instead have a future auxiliary
Ur so real for this bbg
I think everybody's future is looking tense, regardless of one's language.
oh god not the pun
💀
*slow clap*
Thank you for this *present* of a comment.
I can't get *past* it.
This whole mess is caused by people not making a distinction between grammar and semantics.
Yes this
Sounds like semantics to me
I think you could say that, morphologically, English has two tenses, but semantically has three tenses (as well as four aspects and some amount of moods)
It's also majorly grounded in early modern linguists finding latin sources and trying to directly apply their contents to their own languages.
But... grammantics and grammantics are the same thing, right? That's why they have the same name, right??
Lest I forget all my ESL teachers scaring us with “English has 12 tenses!” While they are just the simple, continuous, perfect and perfect continuous times 3, and some of them have incredibly niche uses
Worst thing is distinguishing "will be" and "be going to". Like c'mon bruh why must it be like that?
They'll be out of a job if the masses catch on to how superfluous it all is.
@@obiwancannoli1920 I mean, as long as we're distinguishing perfect and simple past, might as well distinguish prospective and future.
@@obiwancannoli1920 This is one of the many aspects I like in learning languages. It's just so interesting to learn what certain languages focus on which yours doesn't. My language isn't gendered so 3rd person singular is just one word. Having to stop and think about one's gender (especially if it's an animal! Like how TF can you tell to begin with??) can be frustrating at times, but it's awesome how you can encode some information with just a simple pronoun!
We also don't make a distinction between 'will' and 'going to', but that can also hide a little hint, or you can express yourself in a more nuanced way.
Three different gendered articles in German which you also have to conjugate? Atrocious? Absolutely. Does it open more dimensions? Also absolutely.
@@Dicska It definitely makes up the beauty of language. It's kinda why I chose English, to be puzzled by odd grammar (grammatical?) rules.
Ya know, this video could have been titled "The future is a mood". A missed opportunity.
I get the joke but it really isn’t tho
@@efectovogel8295 In English all the moods are, instead of conjugated, expressed through modal verbs. Just consider "will" the modal for future and "would" it's past tense to convey the consequence or subsequence of an action in the past.
The same way it is done for ability, obligation, permission, prohibition, probability...
@@migueljoserivera9030 damn, so many moods to feel
I've always wondered if there's a connection between the old fashioned "to will" (to want) and the future modal verb "will". Maybe it came from describing future actions as something you "want" to do
in fact, you have described the evolution of "will" perfectly!!
I will to do that -> I will do that
seems like a rather logical explanation indeed.
@@abarette_ will and the germen wollen
@@abarette_ erm ackchully it was always "I will do that." ; there was never a "to" because "will" is (and always has been) a modal verb (yes English has those, too). Only the meaning changed.
@@abarette_ actually if the verb willing (german wollen) had been a modal verb then it would have not had “to” after the other verb. For example can is a modal verb and we don’t say “I can to go in my room” because can is a modal verb and doesn’t need to, hence it wouldn’t have ever been “I will to do sth” but rather “I will do something” because it had been a modal.
In german we say:
Ich will gehen.
I will go. (Will here means I want)
Not to mention, the future auxiliary verbs 'will' and 'shall' also have grammatical past tense forms 'would' and 'should' which instead encode modality.
how come there's no such equivalent for 'could'? It's really annoying.
"I'll be able to do that" (7), jesus christ that's a long way from "ch'pourrai faire ça" (4)
@@abarette_ Wouldn't that be "can"? "I can do that" sounds perfectly fine to me
@@FishyAshB I mean I guess, but can isn't indicating any kind of future, it's just context dependant
"I can do that" can very well mean "I can do that, like right now" and "I can do that, like next week or so"
@@FishyAshBcan is present and could/can is defective
It’s should/shall, would/will, could/can
I think the best illustration for this is the fact, that casual German actually does fine without "werden" - you just simply add a time marker. "Ich mache es morgen" - "I do it tomorrow". So, your present and future tense could be identical and that's normal
I think you can also do something similar in English! Instead of using going to or will, I could say something like "I work tomorrow."
agree
Very natural for me to say “Do you have school/work tomorrow?
Are you working tomorrrow?”
I don’t speak German, but this specific example can be said without the future tense in many Romance languages like Italian (Lo faccio domani), Portuguese (eu faço amanhã) or Spanish, so I don’t think this really proves anything
@@SeaRobin48-- yeah, but "I get cold tomorrow"? "I fight with my best friend tomorrow"? "I'm punched tomorrow"? "I die tomorrow"?
I'm not so sure, the lack of a future(/intentionality) marker always works so well in the context you mention.
My guess is that people can say "I [DO SOMETHING] tomorrow" whenever they can also say "I [DO SOMETHING] Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays."
Or perhaps the _lack_ of "will", rather than its presence, is what, ironically enough, signals something like intention. So "I work tomorrow" means "I plan to work tomorrow". But no one plans to get hit by lightning and go into cardiac arrest, so "I'll have a heart attack tomorrow" sounds less grammatically weird than "I have a heart attack tomorrow."
@@declup The point is *not* that it always works. The point is that it sometimes works. Whereas, with the past, it never works. You can never say "I'm working yesterday." - that's just ungrammatical. There is no idiomatic and reasonable way to describe something happening in the past without conjugating the verb into the past tense, so we say that the past is grammaticalized. There are many future constructions that sometimes work, so the future is not fully grammaticalized.
I think one important point is that in both English and German you *don't even need* the auxiliary construction to form perfectly grammatical sentences which talk about the future. All you need is some indication of the time period to nudge the interpretation into being future. So in both English and German you can say "I'm eating pasta tomorrow" (or "Morgen esse ich Pasta") - both perfectly cromulent "present tense" constructions with a "tomorrow" jammed on, which in turn form perfectly cromulent sentences talking about the future. Note that in both languages you also CAN'T say *"I'm eating pasta yesterday" (or *"Gestern esse ich Pasta"). So if you needed further evidence that English and German have "past" and "not-past", this is it.
You made me lookup _cromulent._ Thanks-I learnt a new word today. Not bad for a lazy Saturday! 👍
@@nHans Coined in a throwaway joke in The Simpsons:
Jebediah: [on film] A noble spirit embiggens the smallest man.
Mrs. Krabappel: Embiggens? I never heard that word before I moved to Springfield.
Ms. Hoover: I don't know why. It's a perfectly cromulent word.
Bonus points for cromulent. Good explanation.
"in both English and German you can say "I'm eating pasta tomorrow""
However, you can't say "I eat past tomorrow".
You can say "I'm eating pasta yesterday" with the addition of "so, I'm eating pasta yesterday when suddenly I was mugged" - the present tense is used for emphasis even though the story is occuring in the past.
Funny thing about French tenses: there are more than what you outlined, as we have, in addition to compound tenses, overcompound tenses ("temps surcomposés"), which can be used to indicate that two actions closely follow each other. They are constructed by adding another modal verb in the sentence, so that you have, in a single sentence, one conjugates modal and two past participles (one modal and one non modal).
I. E. : « Dès qu'elle a eu fini de boire son café, elle s'en alla » (As soon as she was done drinking her coffee, whe left).
Though they fell into total disuse over the last century, Proust, Hugo, Voltaire etc. knew and used those tenses within their works: « À peine l’avais-je eu quittée qu’ils s’étaient reformés » (Proust, Le Côté de Guermantes - "I had not sooner left her, that they had re-formed")
French historic past
It seems many French forms disappeared
French doesn’t use their perfect/preterite system anymore and just uses passé compose
@@duckymomo7935 Even though French perfect is not used anymore in day-to-day speech, it remains taught to every French student and survives within literature; whereas overcompound tenses are widely unknown to most native speakers. You would have to read a grammar book to even learn about their existence
Also the future and conditional, with a few exceptions like être, is derived from the infinitive and suffixed by the verb avoir (dropping av if it would start the suffix), the present avoir making the future tense, the imperfect the conditional. Thus je parlerai and parlerais, tu parleras and parleras, etc. It comes from a Latin construction of infinitive followed by the appropriate form of to have. (être uses ser plus the suffix since verbs meaning "to be" tend to be weird.)
The future tense is also disappearing in Brazilian Portuguese. It's grammatical, but barely anyone uses it anymore in conversation i.e. instead of saying "Maria comprará os tomates," one usually says "Maria vai comprar os tomates" (which is the same structure as "Maria will buy the tomatoes", the verb "vai" is a similar auxilliary to "will" in English)
Huh, this is also happening in french (at least in Québec, idk about France). We usually say "Je vais acheter des tomates" instead of "J'achèterai des tomates"
"Compraré los tomates" is not at all common in my local variant of Venezuelan Spanish either. Normally we would use the auxiliary verb too ("Voy a comprar los tomates")
That's happening in Spanish, too. The strict "future simple" tense is being reserved for very specific situations, such as promises:
"Ahí estaré para ti" - I'll be there for you
But the use that fascinates me the most is speculation, which can replace expresions using "ha de" + verb ("ha" comes from "haber", which is the equivalent to the auxiliary "have" in English, so, in some way it can be related to "have to", and thus, related to "must").
"Ha de ser por el calor" = "Será por el calor" - It must be because of the heat.
"Ha de venir a pie" = "Vendrá a pie" - He/She must be coming by foot.
In coloquial situations implying future, it is prefered to use simple present and a future expression of time, or the construction "ir a", which is equivalent to "be going to"; as the future sumple sounds too artificial or too TV-dubbing.
This seems to be happening in many Indo-European languages, if not in all of them. South Slavic languages have lost their synthetic future morphemes (if you can even call them that, as they were present perfective forms) and developed analytic forms under the influence of the Balkan sprachbund (compare Greek and Albanian).
It almost looks like a pan-European development that started many centuries ago, but was somewhat held back by the standardization of languages.
@DanielEsparza37 as someone learning Spanish, this sounds rather disappointing. I like future endings on verbs as it makes them longer and more fun to say. Also adding an ir before hand reminds me too much of English and makes me worried about our language infecting everything.
i thought of this as well
"why do they call it a future tense if 'will' is just an auxilliary verb?"
however, a friend of mine considers that there is no future tense _conjugation_
as using "will" is an unambiguous way to talk about events that happen in the future
eh. this is what i mean by my point at the end of the video. you can then say that english has five tenses or nine tenses or however many you like... "English HAS a remote past tense, just no remote past tense CONJUGATION" and so on for any tense you want to add
"he will be home by now" is not in future tense though
Yeah, the idea that you can do a fairly regular, standardised thing to a verb to make it refer to the past:
"walk" -> add "-ed" morpheme to the end -> "walked"
yet if you do an even more regular, standardised thing to a verb to make it refer to the future:
"walk" -> add "will " morpheme to the front -> "will walk"
one of them counts as a tense and one of them doesn't because of a space in the way we represent them orthographically (which as far as I can work out, seems to be what this effectively boils down to!), seems like a definition that makes the idea of a tense such a weirdly-defined thing that I am at a bit of a loss to know what is then the point of this concept at all, if not some really lazy historical thing based on a really specific way that some particular languages work (cough, it's definitely not always you Latin, is it, cough) that's then been assumed to have some more general linguistic relevance.
(Or to put it another way, English speakers don't really add an auxiliary verb to make a future tense, because "auxiliary verb" is not a concept that exists for speakers, it's a way for linguist to rationalise, after the fact, what the speaker just did. And the linguists call that added future-marking morpheme: /l/ or /wɪl/, "'ll" or "will", an "auxiliary verb" only because they've already decided they're not going to recognise "will walk" as a verb, so they need another name for that morpheme!)
@@zak3744 This is my problem exactly. If the perfectly regular construct of the english simple future tense is not a tense at all then what even is a tense. Some morphemes that describe time are tenses and some aren't so then tense cannot be a morpheme that marks time. What is the point of having a thing called grammatical tense that excludes ways of grammatically constructing tense and only allowing conjugated tense. Semantics are part of grammar so a tense constructed semantically is a grammatically constructed tense. Linguistics already has a way to make this distinction though with participles so it is true that english has no future participle (conjugation) but it does have a future tense that is constructed with will and the infinitive.
@@Valentine570 Using modal verbs isn't a tense because the modal verb is a whole other word, with its own conjugations and tenses. For example, the past tense (and subjunctive form) of "will" is "would", just like how the past tense of "can" is "could".
I recently took Dutch lessons and the "future tense" was taught as part of modal verbs (works basically the same as German), and I found it made the two concepts so much simpler. I learnt German in secondary school and they were taught seperately, so having them taught together was a huge "oh, wait, it's that simple?" moment.
Great video! Even in French, people often use a similar structure as English and German for the future rather than the proper future tense ("je vais manger" rather than "je mangerai") as the latter can sound formal or old-fashioned in some cases.
Same in iberian romance languages
In Spanish it's the same, for example, people normally say "voy a hacer" instead of "haré", which is more formal.
Same in portuguese, i guess we just learn those to understand the language better, because most people don't speak like that, even in formal settings
I wouldn't say it a matter of formality, but more of how far in the future it's going to happen.
"je vais manger" is near future, "I will eat soon"/"i'm going to eat"/"I wil eat after this"
"je mangerai" is future we have no idea how far but we don't think about it being soon, "I will eat at some point"/ "I will eat after that thing that is also in the future"
@@_.__-._-_.-..-... Not really, wouldn't it sound unnatural to say "je mangerai" by itself? Even specifying only what will be eaten, wouldn't it still sound "too formal"? I don't speak french btw
The irony with the French future tense (and in most romance languages for that matter) is that it comes from an UNgrammaticalised way of expressing the future, equivalent to "infinitive+have conjugated for present tense" which was later grammaticalised into something synthetic.
Wait until you find out where literally all of grammar in literally all of language comes from ;)
Interesting, because if you say "I have to go" in English, it implies an obligation to do so, on top of just stating the fact of the future event.
And at some point they formed the conditional by infinitive+have conjugated for the imperfect tense. They did drop the av part of avoir when they synthesized it.
Same for Spanish! Which is not surprising since the future forms even sound similar.
Comeré
Ah oui, le fameux "nous mangeravons"...
In spoken colloquial German, one can also use the present tense to express some defined future events.
An example would be: "Ich gehe morgen einkaufen" ( I (will) go shopping tomorrow. )
Putting that sentence in future tense (Ich werde morgen einkaufen gehen) is not necessary, since the word "morgen"(tomorrow) already tells everyone that it is the future.
Only when one doesn't have another word in the sentence that defines the time frame, one needs to use future tense, like: "Ich werde einkaufen gehen." (I will go shopping). That implies that you are not doing now, but sometime in the unspecified future (which can be sooner or later).
Even in the last example you can use "Ich geh später einkaufen" (I will go shopping later)
@@Nikola_M Yes, you can do so, but that's exactly what I was trying to say. If you add a word that specifies some form of time (in this case simply the future (irgendwann would also work), one can drop the grammatical future tense in favour of the present tense.
You can sort of do this in English too. "When do you go on holiday?" "I go next week."
I almost always say "going to" when talking about the future to my family in Spanish, I can conjugate future tense, but I don't ever remember a time that I hear my family use future tense.
In Portuguese we have a huge table for verb tenses. And in colloquial speech we only use a few. We have the "true future" like "Eu comerei" meaning "I will eat". But we can also say "Eu vou comer/eu irei comer", and it is what we usually use in colloquial speech.
Also, while learning English, we often translate the auxiliary verb "will" as the present form if the verb "ir" (to go). It is almost the same thing if we use it as an auxiliary verb.
Something that is difficult about English is the past/present continuous, or other tenses we usually treat differently in Portuguese.
For example "I have arrived at the restaurant" means that I arrived at the restaurant and I'm currently there. It is different from "I arrived at the restaurant" where in this case I'm telling something that happened in the past, but not necessarily that I'm at the restaurant right now.
In Portuguese we don't have this distinction. Both phrases translate to "cheguei no restaurante", what differentiate them is the use of some adverb, like "agora" (now).
The same applies to the use of "had" or even "had had", "have had" etc.
I love how each language has its own particularities and it influences the way we interact with the world.
Portuguese is brutal when it comes to verbs, and even though people who speak Portuguese may not realize it, it's a privilege to know that language due to all the advantages it provides when learning new languages. It's the romance language with the most verbal forms, comparable only to Latin itself. Not only does it have almost every conjugation Latin has, it also developed a few new ones. As an example, Portuguese conjugates even the infinitive, something no other romance language does*, and something few other languages in the world do. On top of that, Portuguese allows for modal forms for almost every conjugation, meaning it allows for constructions similar to "I will"(eu vou), "I shall"(eu irei), etc. This extends to the subjunctive as well and other things English doesn't have an equivalent to.
When it comes to pronunciation, Portuguese is extremely hard. Like French it has a lot of nasal sounds, some of which are absurdly rare(the -ã and õ sound are possibly unique to the language, I only heard of one other language possibly having something similar). The reason I said Portuguese speakers are quite privileged to know the language is that it effectively exposes them to a lot of concepts found in other languages, including very rare concepts. For instance, it is common for Brazilian Portuguese to work like a topic language(e.g. Japanese) as it allows for that kind of construction, meaning Portuguese speakers have an innate understanding of one of the hardest and most unique aspects of Japanese. The same goes for its sounds, because of all the sounds Portuguese has, Portuguese speakers can more easily hear the proper sounds other languages use(this concept is well-known in Phonology and Linguistics, you can't easily hear the sounds you are not familiar with).
To make matters even more interesting, Portuguese declines articles through contraction. I'm not going to explain what declension is, but think of it as "conjugating" a noun according to its role in a sentence. Portuguese does that for articles. For instance, "para a" tends to become "pra"(to the), which is a dative. "De a"(of the) becomes "da", which is a genitive. "A/o"(the) marks the accusative. There are many other such examples. So while Portuguese doesn't decline nouns(except for pronouns), it also exhibits a similar process to declensions that provides an intuitive understanding of it.
People like to mention French and Spanish in these discussions to give an example of a language with a lot of verbal forms, but compared to the other romance languages French conjugation is very simple. Spanish has a lot more forms than French so at least it makes more sense to mention it, even if not as many as Portuguese.
* Galician also conjugates the infinitive, but it's so similar to Portuguese it can be considered a dialect of the language. Galician lacks a lot of the other verbal forms that Portuguese has, however.
yeeeeeah, finally i have a video to back my explanations up! i keep explaining that to my students but sometimes it feels like i'm crazy, going against The Textbooks with my "two tenses in English". thanks for making me feel a bit more normal and less alone 😄
I also find it arbitrary that “grammaticalization” be a requisite for a “tense.” “Yo seré” is basically “yo ser he,” exactly equivalent to the modern Spanish construction of “yo he de ser.” So, Spanish has two future tenses now? How about the contraction of “will” as in “that’ll”? Isn’t that grammaticalization as well? If so, then English does have a future tense; it’s just marked on the pronoun, like in Hausa.
The reason contractions usually aren't considered is because contractions in English are very strange. Your example wouldn't be a universal construction that could be applied in any grammatical context like a tense can. You can't say the sentence "She will" as "she'll" without additional information.
The issue is that it's linguistics, human language is very hard to form to rigid patterns. If you feel the grammaticalization argument is arbitrary, it probably is in some way.
She'll cannot be stressed in a sentence, so 'll is taken as a clitic. The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language argues that "won't" is actually an inflection of "will" and not just a contraction thanks to its ability of being stressed in a sentence.
Just because it is analytic does not mean that it's not there
I think part of the reason for the colloquial use of "tense" to refer to both formal-linguistic tense and aspect is because both of them deal with time (the moment of occurrence, duration, frequency...) And "tense" etymologically came from French "tens → temps" that just means 'time'.
Shouldn’t the arrow be pointing in the other direktion?
If anyone wants to learn more about why English is considered to have no future tense, I recommend the book "The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language" by Rodney Huddleston, Geoffrey K. Pullum, or the more accessible and compact version "A Student's Introduction To English Grammar" by the same authors.
It explains the distinction between "future tense" (a grammatical category) and "future time" (a semantic category), and many more aspects of the English language. Definitely a worthwhile book to fully understand how English works!
Polish has an interesting way of expressing future. It has a distinction between perfective and imperfective verbs (whether the action is already done or in progress) and in the past tense you can use both and will mean the past. In present tense though, if you use the imperfective aspect, it's in the present, and if you use the perfective aspect, it's in the future. If you want to express an imperfective action in the future, you have to use the so called compound future tense which is "to be" in future conjugation plus infinitive or past (yes, past) conjugation. Although past conjugation is also used for conditionals and subjunctive mood so I maybe it's just some sort of basic conjugation that also happens to be used in past tense. What I love about all this is that it has no expeptions whatsoever (or at least I'm aware of none) and that I've only recently made myself aware of it, being a native speaker.
And to clear this up in advance, Polish "to be" does have a true future conjugation. Although a few "normal" verbs seem to have it as well, so now I'm not sure if any of these are really true future conjugations or just cleverly disguised perfective conjugations with no comparison to judge against
I wanted to write the same thing, so I'll just add onto it and illustrate it on some examples:
"być" ("to be") - "będę" (~"I will be")
Imperfective in present - "kupować" (imperfective "to buy") - > "kupuję" (~"I am buying")
Imperfective in future - "będę kupować" (literally "I will be [imperfective]buy") or "będę kupował/kupowała" (literally "I will be [imperfective 3rd person male/female]bought")
Perfective - "kupiłem/kupiłam" ("I [perfective 3rd person male/female]bought") "kupię" (~"I will buy")
I know there are some shorthands for aspects, persons, genders, etc., but I'm not well-versed enough in them to use them 😅
Edit: just to clarify, the "bought" I used is the simple past, not bought in "I will be bought" as in "Somebody will buy me"
@@sallomon2357 Actually "kupić" is the exact verb that's haunting me whenever I think of whether Polish has a true future tense 😂
I mean, to me "kupię" feels very much like a true future form. But now that I'm writing about it, maybe it's because it behaves kind of the opposite way? Unlike most verbs, it's perfective right away without any prefixes. Take "robić" ("do"), for example. It's imperfective and "robię" is a present conjugation. It only becomes to mean a future action when you add a prefix ("zrobię"). Now, as you showed, the imperfective counterpart of "kupić" i "kupować", so maybe the weird group that seems to have true future conjugations are just those verbs that have an accompanying verb to convey the other aspect instead of changing it with prefixes. I don't know, someone more educated in liguistics and Polish grammar than I am would have to look into this.
Anyway, thanks for your comment!
@@SapphireScrollkupię is just irregular perfective form, you can understand irregular verbs as having unusual imperfective and perfective forms, instead of "true future tenses"
@@kacperwoch4368 Thanks!
There are four main ways (there are more, but they are rarer) of forming perfective-imperfective pairs in Polish
- adding a prefix to imperfective to get perfective
- adding -nąć to imperfective to get perfective
- changing vowels to a in perfective to get imperfective
- adding -[o/i/y]wać to perfective to get imperfective
kupić-kupować is an instance of the 4th method.
Sometimes you can get nice verb chains: walnąć (P) - walić (I) - przewalić (P) - przewalać (I), tupnąć (P) - tupać (I) - przytupać (P) - przytupywać (I)
In persian, we have 4 modal verbs that correspond to can/should/may/will (german wollen) and we use that will to create our future tense.
In spoken Italian you can use the present simple to talk about planned actions (“I do it tomorrow” “Lo faccio domani” = “I will do it tomorrow”)
What does "grammaticalized" mean though? Why does a construction with an auxiliary verb not count as grammaticalized? I mean "yo cantaré" developed from "yo cantar he". Would the former count as grammaticalized while the latter would not even though the difference is just in orthography?
Firstly, modern spanish doesn't analyze cantaré as cantar + he, but as its own thing. Secondly, "haber de + infinitivo" is a verbal periphrasis of obligation and not a futurate like "ir a + infinitivo".
There is a strong argument to be made that English, and German for that matter, do have future tenses, despite appearances to the contrary. The future is very clearly grammaticalised, just through the use of auxiliaries. It isn't inflected, but it is grammaticalised. The future clearly isn't a mood, and, crucially, it can combine with moods in a way that modal auxiliaries can't usually do - the future conditional doesn't need an extra auxiliary, it just modifies (replaces) the existing conditional auxiliary - just like the past conditional does: "I can, I might, I could". Compare that to a conditional potential: "I could be able to" (or "I might could" in some dialects.)
It really depends on whether the model you're using allows for periphrasitc tenses or insists on only having inflectional tenses. There is, despite what you say here, no consensus among linguists as to what does and does not constitute tense. For me, what interesting about the Germanic way of conjugating the future is that it puts the future inflections on the auxiliary, rather than on the main verb. Which is just interesting, and shows that a language can have multiple methods of doing the same thing, but in different and exclusive circumstances. That's a much more interesting takeaway for me.
However, this is a good introduction video for folks to get into looking a little deeper into thinking about what a tense is, which can only be a good thing.
It's always so fascinating with features /not/ in different languages :) thank you so much for sharing
While it's true that Spanish has a lot of tenses, in practice many are rarely used. To the point that even the future tense is often replaced with the corresponding conjugation in present of the verb "ir" (to go) plus the verb you want to turn into future tense.
So instead of "haré" is more common to say "voy a hacer".
I know this video isn't necessarily about conlangs, but I got more into linguistic stuff through your channel, and discovered Tsevhu, a beautiful language that is way too easy to learn lol, there aren't many resources about it on TH-cam, so I'd love for you to check it out!
As a native Romanian speaker (Romance language), I hated Romanian Classes throughout middle school, because the moment the “Past” tense became a flowchart of different past tense I began zoning out and failing in it. Our tense system is so f’ing complicated and I still don’t fully understand how it works to this day.
(It didn’t help that we have cases in Romanian as well, but luckily, they’re not too complex; imagine if you combined the first 2 German tenses into a single tense and the last 2 tenses into another separate tense; that’s our tense system)
So much of Romanian is just Latin wearing an oversized trench coat. Makes me feel less like I wasted my time learning Latin in the first place : )
@@SocialDownclimber
I am glad to know you didn’t gave up on your goals!
If tense is understood as the difference between the reference time (when the described events happened) and the evaluation time (when the speaking about those events occurs), then you can see past, present, and future as the relative position between the two. The distinction between grammaticalized or syntactically constructed tense kinda falls into the bucket of "interesting variation". But some languages simply don't even have tense in this way, being unable to point to events in a different time. Rather, they shift the whole evaluation timeframe forward or back: "Can you imagine the year 2100? We have colonies on the moon, everybody wears polyester clothing, and scientists have just discovered a new gender, adding to the five already known..."
That sounds a lot easier to learn than a bunch of arbitrary verb forms! But it must be hard switching frames of reference if you want to talk about two different points in time at once. Imagine the year 2100. We have a colony on Mars. Now think about the present. No one is on Mars.
I've noticed that my friends and I (late 20s, British, native English speaker) will often use the present tense for actions in the near future, i.e. "What are you doing tonight? I'm playing football." To me this makes total sense, but I wonder if this would be confusing for non-native speakers, especially if their native language has an actual grammaticised future tense.
This thing exists in Arabic; We have a non-past form which refers to either the future or the present but you can't know until I add a "sign" (Idk the proper word for it)
And here I think it's perfectly understable, it's just that the sign is implied (I'm playing football tonight), and it's omitted because you're answering a question.
In fact, you could even omit the "I'm" because, from the question, you already know that the answer is gonna start with "I'm"
So you can just say:
"What are you doing tonight?"
"Playing football"
It can also occasionally happen that you don't need a time indicator at all. It's not necessarily as obvious though but I can see this conversation being understood as being about the future:
Person 1: 'I'm so excited'
Person 2: 'Oh yeah, what for?'
Person 1: 'I'm watching a film with my friends'
Person 2: 'Is that the one about the aliens?'
Person 1: 'Absolutely! What are you up to?'
Person 2: 'Reading this amazing book'
While technically all in the present tense, should both people be stood in a room together, the context cause would point to it being about the future. Since neither person is actually currently doing those things and can be seen not doing them, they are therfore most likely future related without using timephrases. I just find that really interesting tbh
Interestingly, if you analyze the construction of the Future tense in Spanish, you find something similar: verbs forms like "iré" or "comeremos" are historically "ir _he"_ and "comer _hemos"._ They came about by adding the verb "haber" (expressing duty, obligation or necessity) after other verbs, much like English uses "will" which expresses, well, _will_ and intention. Basically, Spanish is doing the same thing English does, only saying "I have to go" where English says "I want to go".
The general consensus among linguists* seems to be that, whereas the distinction between Past and Non-past is pretty basic to Indo-European languages, articulation of the Future as a distinct tense tends to come about pretty late in the language's development, and is often made by repurposing some other mechanism.
*(at least it _was_ the general consensus las time I checked)
"In English, the future tense isn't formed using inflection"
Fixed it for you.
English speakers conceptualise "I will run" as being an example of the future tense. It's not just useless, but actively counterproductive to arbitrarily define that away.
Chinese doesn't have tense (you just specify the time or be ambiguous) but it does have characters you add for aspect. So many people teach about "past tense" and "future tense" in Chinese when in fact they are teaching about aspects (for example 了 for completion of an event). So lots of learners wrongly use the aspects when they are talking about tense making the sentence they make wrong or misleading.
In polish we have a grammaticized future tense for perfective grammatical aspect (like "I will draw" instead of "I will be drawing"), but the other type for imperfective aspect is in 2 words: "I will be" (which is one word) + the verb in infinitive form
I noticed it while learning English too. When you say "I will do this tommorow." you really say "I want to do it tommorow." as opposed to that it's going to happen. On the other hand, if we get philosophical, CAN we really talk about the future? Not really. We can only say what we expect to happen, and what are we planning to do, but we can't ever say anything for certain.
German and English also have a subjunctive mood, although it's almost disappeared from English now and tends to be limited to a few stock phrases or sound old fashioned - "if I _were_ you", "if music _be_ the food of love".
I like the reflections you brought. I guess when you are a language teacher the best you can do is trying to help the learners understand why the given names and the classifications. It's what I try to do every day...
as a native speaker of a romance language (brazilian), this video is funny because we're currently in the process of dropping our future tense in favor of an auxiliary verb
"assistirei" (i will watch), is properly conjugated in the future tense, but no one would say that word today. instead they'd say "vou assistir": aux verb comes first (and is conjugated in the present), semantical verb comes last and is in the infinitive
in fact, we can go as far as saying that no Indo-European language truly has a future tense, as diachronically all of them are modeled on modal verbs, e.g. fr. “I will sleep” je dormir-ai=to sleep.INF + to have.1SG.IND. Moreover, in case of French, as they are in the process of changing like half of their grammar, future simple “je ferai” (I will do) is replaced by future proche “je vais faire” (I will do, initially “I am about to do in the nearest future”), the first being considered formal and being only used in writing or in the southern regions - which is a new grammaticalisation for the old concept . If we focus on the sounds, old /žö-fer-ē/ is replaced by /žö-vē-fēr/, where the 1st unit is the new marker for 1SING, second marks the future tense, and the third is the infinitive, so looks almost identical to English model. It’s interesting how, lacking some categories in the beginning and creating them, languages reinvent them later again.
Just to be "thay guy": in Romance languages, grammarians debate whether we should talk about a conditional mode or an indicative future in the past, since most of them have the same form for both. That's particularly true for Gallo-Romance and Ibero-romance; Italian is a weird exception, where future in the past is expressed by the compound form that takes the meaning of future in the past ("Non sapevp quando saresti arrivato.") Compare French "Je ne savais pas quand tu arriverais" or Portuguese "Eu não sabia quando chegarias."
All that to say that - yes, it can be categorized as a tense, specifically the past, in the prospective aspect.
In Western Slavic languages (more concretely Slovak and Czech as I can't speak Polish, but I assume the same thing is the case), there are certain verbs with which there is a future tense, as in a distinct grammatical way you form the word to talk about the future and some words with which you need to use a modal verb. It's kind of interesting and I never really thought about it in this way.
I am Polish so I can confirm that this is also the case in Polish. The difference here is verb aspect, which in (West) Slavic languages is part of the word, so what is a present tense conjugation for an imperfective verb becomes a future tense conjugation for the respective perfective verb. You then use a periphrastic construction for the future tense of imperfective verbs.
I think the term 'modal verb' as used in the description of the grammar of Germanic languages doesn't translate well to Slavic languages. Modal verbs in English (or German, Dutch, Icelandic etc.) are a distinct morpho-syntactic category. Slavic and Romance languages, on the other hand have just regular verbs that express necessity, possibilty, desire etc.
Neither Czech, Polish or Slovak use semantically modal verbs as auxiliaries. As far as I know, the only auxiliary verb in Czech and Slovak is the verb 'to be' (used for the passive voice, the past tense and the future of imperfective verbs). Polish has two more auxiliaries:
1)'zostać' (to become perf.) for the processual/agentive passive, ('być' is used for the stative/resultative passive)
2) mieć' (to have) is used with the passive participle of transitive verbs as a resultative active. This is arguably a rather new verb form that is colloquial and not universal for all speakers (as in it might sound unusual for them or they might not use it themselves even if they do understand it)
@@AnonYmous-jp3qd That's past/nonpast tense ditinction: IPFV in nonpast is present, PFV in nonpast is future. And future for IPFV is with auxiliary construction
@@AnonYmous-jp3qd All slavic languages have verb aspect. But in my language (Bulgarian) every verb requires the "will" particle to form the future, using the imperfect form in the present on its own is just wrong.
Very nice video! One noticeable difference between English and German "Future Tense" is that in German one uses the Present Tense a lot more to talk about the future. So "werden" in German is much less used than "will" in English.
id say "werden" is certainly used less, but the present is used all the time to talk about the future in english too: "i'm playing football tomorrow" etc
Yes, I also meant the usage in comparison :)@@kklein
I just read an article on the "tenseless theory of time" so i expected something else when clicking on this video, but it was still very interesting and worth watching!
Just say that English, German, etc. don't have a morphological future tense and there you go. Easier than arguing about whether auxiliary constructions are grammaticalized tense or not.
true
my intro syntax class referred to the syntactic element that precedes the verb as the Tense, despite the fact that we'd put stuff like "should" and "to" (infinitive) in it, _and we would even discuss the fact some words had tensed and some words had tenseless featural properties_ but somehow still call it the Tense, and that annoyed me to no end lol.
I'm fully behind this. For some weird reason our understanding of grammar (especially grammar in the didactical sense, not the linguistic sense) is filtered through a Latin lens
When living in the moment gets a whole new meaning
Technically, English has no future tense. And by saying that I mean that verbs do not change their forms for the future (unlike the past, eg go->went). The verbs do not change. But we can use either willl+ infinitive, colloquially referred to as the future simple, going to plus infinitive or one of the two present tenses
imo some dialects of English actually do have future tense, for example in my ideolect i have, past tense "i went", present tense "i go", near future tense "imma go", and future tense "ill go" (tho i usually conflate imma and ill both into imma), and while in most dialects imma and ill are considered "conjunctions" i always thought of them as inflected according to the tense of the verb, and all honesty saying "i'm going to go" or "i will go" don't feel like the same thing in the way "can not" and "can't" do and i've always thought grammar was just a way of categorizing the gut feelings that are given to us from the language center of our brain
anyway i did really enjoy your video, i think it was funny and insightful as always and i hope you keep up the good work :)
this is actually a really cool take, love this omg
I love your "i am superior" tone to these videos!
Subjunctive in Spanish is not a tense but "a mode", a family of tenses that usually imply that another tense is used in the same sentence to specify continuity or different times in which actions take place.
In Italian as well I feel we don't use the future that often when there's something else indicating that the action is in the future. "Domani devo studiare" or "Tra un mese inizio a lavorare". On the other hand we use the future if the "when" is undefined.
Same thing is happening with the far away past (passato remoto) which at least in the north of the country has been dead for decades. When someone speaks using it, it feels very unnatural to me. Even though it is still used in books and articles it basically does not exist in the spoken language and was replaced by the perfect tense.
Non sono d'accordo che il passato remoto non esiste nel parlato. Se devi raccontare una storia che comincia con "c'era una volta", come continui? Il passato remoto è il tempo della narrativa, che sia scritta o parlata. Questa è la sua funzione nell'italiano di oggi, e tutti lo usano e lo capiscono.
Been speaking Spanish and English my entire life and even learned the grammar of Spanish a bit closer with actual courses but never once did it pop into my mind that anytime we did future conjugations the instructor always added “will” in front of the verb translation.
I'm pretty sure the past/non-past distinction was also the case in the past in Semitic languages, however, unlike Germanic languges, those forms came to mean past and *future* rather than past and present.
some Semitic languages developed a present tense to compensate, but some didn't, so to this day Hebrew and some variaties of Arabic use the participle as the present and don't really have a gramattical present tense.
This was a great video! Thank you so much!
English does have the future tense, it just encodes it into an auxiliary verb instead into a verb conjugation.
My personal standard is: it is a tense, if it cannot be replaced by time indication.
In english a stentence like: I work yesterday is complete nonsense, while: I work tomorrow is perfectly sensible.
Similarly in danish:
Jeg arbeder igår, is nonsense, while Jeg arbejder imorgen is not.
For a (mostly) completely unrelated language in greenlandic: I work is sulivunga, which has past forms such as: sulinikuuvunga. However, Yesterday I worked is still: Ipassaq sulivunga.
On the other hand, if you say: Aqagu sulivunga, you will likely be corrected. Aqagu sulisaanga, is a correct form, with both a time indication and a temporal affix.
Could you clarify the Greenlandic examples to me? Are you saying it doesn't have a past tense? Because it can be expressed by using the present and a temporal exression
@@nushious exactly. As long as the time is clear, there is no need to mark time in the verb.
The way I viewed it was that originally languages probably had distinct words which modified simple verbs but over time they merged together. "Walked" = "walk" + "ed". But if there are different words for the same thing like "will" and "shall" they may remain separate.
In Hungarian future is also expressed by an auxiliary verb fogni, and it used simillar as German werden and English will.
The problem with this analysis is that it assumes you can use the present tense to talk about future events in English, but you cannot. Saying "I go to school" is very different from "I will going to school", which is also different from "I'm going to school tomorrow" itself different from "I'm going to school".
In languages with a past - non past distinction like Japanese, you can use the present tense for future events, you do not need a special verb phrase. Moreover, just because English does not express the future tense with one word, does not mean that English does not have one. That's like saying that French or Italian have no past tense because it's not one word.
I understand this video's point -- the word "will" has its origin as a modal verb, a way to express intention or desire; and contemporary English has no fully grammaticalized affix for the future tense.
Still, though, the use of "will" and " going to" for future action seems pretty grammar-y to me. Not plumb at the bottom of the grammaticalization cline, but far enough along to be considered, not just a lexical indication of non-modal future, but a syntactic one too.
So I say Modern English does have a future tense. Two of them, actually. They're half-baked. They aren't as pretty as Latin's or Italian's. But they're there.
And also in german, in everyday speech even this form of future "tense" is often not even used. In most instances people will just use the simple present and the future will be inferred by context or specific time markers. One might say: "Tomorrow i go to the library" or "i call you later"
This finally explains to me why I struggled learning French as soon as the future tense was brought in... No one mentioned that there wasn't an English counterpart.
Love this linguistic semantic nitpicking!
Littel Idea: Would've been great if you had pointed out in which sense "I have done" (aka ehhh perfect tense or whatever you call it in english?) is grammaticalized in difference to the future or other modal verbs - since it also somewhat uses the modal "have", with the only difference that it then specifically adds the past participle instead of a simple infinitive, which you could argue sets it apart from simple modal verb constructions. Therefore, the only true past tense that English and German have is the imperfect / simple past
So do you have any advice on expanding conlang vocab
My language Bulgarian has the same thing, the verb ще + present makes future, like in "ще чета" = I will read. The future-in-the-past and future-perfect-in-the-past tenses are also made with an inflected form of this verb: щях да чета and щял съм да чета.
& in all slavic languages - Polish Standard form has constructions “będę robił”, but vernacular, as well as standard, rarely do that way - usually perfective+non-past = future & imperfective+non-past = present
If auxiliaries verbs like "will" and "gonna" are grammatical (as compared to more lexical verbs like "run" and "eat") i dont see why it should be seen as not a tense. Its still a distinct construction, even if its not formed by conjugstion of some form. This definition of the grammaticality of tense would seem to indicate a synthetic bias more than the view that english does have a tense indicates a romance bias
Grammar is wild but only if we think of it as anything more than descriptive. Most likely any aspect of verbal communication could have a chance to become grammaticalized over time. But it doesn’t have to be. Tense is just one example.
And probably if we went back in time far enough we could even see how all the complicated grammar like conjugation or declination originated from simpler helper words that had much more straightforward meanings. It might be helpful to keep that in mind if you’re learning a language with confusing/hard grammar.
A good (albeit discombobulating) example of how "will" is not the future tense is a sentence like "He will have done it yesterday." Really, all the modals are often about the future, and "will" is just the strongest of them, or the second strongest if we include "I am to".
The future tense in Romance languages was only fairly recently grammaticalised, and you can still feel its modal origin. I will sing (chanterai/canteró/cantaré etc) > I have to sing (to sing I have: chanter ai/ cantar ho / cantar hé etc)
I don’t know how to feel about this. In Italian and French the most common form of past is done with the auxiliary “to have”, with it being generally considered as being one with the verb it’s supporting, contrary to verbs like “must” or “should
2:24 it's amazing how naturalized we each have our own native languages. I'm a native Spanish speaker and that table surprised me since I've always thought as Spanish as a really easy language, which is clearly not the case lol
English not having future tense significantly expedites the learning process for many foreign learners.
Every time someone asks me to explain future tense in English I just say: It's the same as present, but with will, won't or be going to.
And boom, they instantly learnt a new tense.
That said, as a native Spanish Speaker, it gives me a certain comfort when a language has an actual future tense (like French), it makes translating to and from Spanish a lot simpler since I don't have to adapt anything, and to me it just makes sense to have an actual future tense.
I don't think every language should have it, but I won't complain when they do.
I'll have you know that English has a future tense because of the first word of this sentence.
I did not understand a single thing this video... that is utterly amazing!
In German we often just use the present tense and infer future from the context. Most commonly, "ich mache das später/morgen." Literally "I do it later/tomorrow." That is standard spoken German. In an essay or a book, you would have to write "Das werde ich morgen machen/tun." But no-one speaks like a book day to day.
Thanks for reminding me how much I hated learning German. I am now fluent in Japanese and greatly enjoyed learning it.
In Irish the subjunctive (and conditional for that matter) are referred to as ‘modes’ not tenses. I don’t know if that’s what you’d call them in other languages but that’s a direct translation.
I'm not convinced at all by the argument that a tense isn't present just because it's not grammaticalized. Oxford dictionary defines"will" as the verb "expressing the future tense." And I agree with them. The future tense is created with a construction. All languages have some strategy to create the future tense.
I think the point is between grammar and semantics. Grammatically, English does not have a future tense to directly conjugate verbs. Semantically, English obviously does have a future tense because we're talking about it right now.
There are plenty of languages that do not have a grammatical future tense. There are some that don't have _any_ grammatical tenses whatsoever. But everyone on the planet can still talk about events that happen or would happen in the future.
What I like about this way of thinking about tenses in English is that it reduces the number of tenses from 12* to 2. You still have all of those 12 ways of making time references, but they all stem from either the present or the past, and that can massively simplify things for people learning English as a foreign language.
*Past perfect, past perfect continuous, past continuous, past simple, present perfect, present perfect continuous, present continuous, present simple, future perfect, future perfect continuous, future continuous, future simple
Daniel Broomfield has a really good video on this for those who understand Ukrainian.
And Germans don't use "werden" in the same way as English speakers use "will". They actually prefer to speak in present tense and simply add a time descriptor to signal that the sentence is happening in the future.
I think the German grammar problem at the beginning can be explained with the statement that 'werden' is not a modal verb but still requires an infinitive without 'zu'. Hence the similarities.
Interesting video! I spent most of it trying to think of exceptions, but I wasn't able to. I wouldn't doubt that there ain't some English accent out there which may debatably have a future tense. Especially round the folk with rather 'strong' accents where contractions, while written out fully wouldn't count, may count? Like I've heard the phrase "I will be going there" as "I'll b'goin there." I know that contractions probably don't count but if the full form isn't used outside of formal written communication, should it?
"I'll" def counts, "b'goin" is an abomination (breaks english phonotactics), and regardless that's not conjugating the verb (be in that case)
Damn man, an abomination? Hurting my heart. I mean it might not be written that way often, but that's certainly how I've heard it said, that is also how I say it I'm fairly sure. I am not super up to date on literature for linguistics and conjugation, but why doesn't it count as a conjugation?@@abarette_
I dont think it counts as a separate conjugation because it doesn’t stay attached
I’ll be going
vs.
Will you be going?
In a normal declarative, ‘ll functions kind of like a clitic (weak form) attaching to the verb. In a question we see that it’s still its own word.
Yeah that's fair enough. I find it interesting how vastly different my spoken speech is to written speech sometimes. Frankly, I don't know whether someone who was only taught the writing of English would be able to understand me. I've met people in Europe who can't, and I have to revert to a more standard accent (Californian 😔)@@ShoelaceWarHawk
Many of my Chinese students (of computer science) are lazy about conjugating verbs. I have explained sometimes that IE verbs have 7 different attributes* that you have to configure* each time you use one:
▪︎ tense
▪︎ mood
▪︎ aspect
▪︎ voice
▪︎ gender
▪︎ number
▪︎ formality
Weirdly enough, I did learn the future tense as just an extension of modal verbs. Great teachers, I suppose.
Oh yeah, I really _hadn't_ studied a language with a true FUT until I studied a bit of Latin in Upper Secondary School, and we didn't get to the FUT back then. Then Italian for a bit but the same happened there.
So the first true FUT I've learned is that of Koinee Greek? Cool!
In Slavic languages, there is only one single verb that has a grammatical future tense and that is the "to be" copula.
Aside from that, in slavic languages we have generally two ways of expressing the future. First way is that all perfective non-past verbs are in the future (as opposed to impertective verbs which can be used for both present and future) but the difference is purely semantical so we cant call it a tense. another way is to add the future form of "to be" before the infinitive (or past participle in polish for some reason) to form the future, but thats the same as using will in english so it doesnt count either
You're not insinuating that we chuck Latin out the window, eh?
So many ways to convey mood- I suppose no one is able or willing to infer from the context, how other people in the conversation feel?
Also, as a German, we don't even really use "werden" for the future anymore (in casual speech). At least where I live, and from what I see in the media. Most of us don't make any distinction between present and future: "Ich bin (gerade) beim Friseur" - "I'm at the hairdresser's (right now)" vs "Ich bin (morgen) beim Friseur" - "I'll be at the hairdresser's (tomorrow)". Saying "Ich werde morgen beim Friseur sein", while technically correct, sounds kinda stilted and old-timey, at least to me. I'd only use it maybe for emphasis, like "I *will* be at the hairdresser's tomorrow!" but then you could also just say "Ich *bin* morgen beim Friseur!". I don't know, language is already complicated, and the stuff we are taught as "correct" in school is often not how people actually speak, which just makes it even more complicated.
In German, even it has »some kind« of future tenses (as pointed out int he video), it is also possible to talk about future events in present tense, e.g.: _»Ich geh morgen zum Fußball«_
As an English teacher, I think about this a lot, but it's something I barely ever mention in the classroom because it's a counter-productive and unnecessary distinction. Sure, you could explain "Be going to" as a form of present continuous, but it's more helpful to categorize the language into three major tenses, especially for students whose L1 do not show tense. It's one of those things that matter for pure scientific reasons, but translate poorly into a practical ELT setting.
You got a point about the definition of "tense" falling apart when we look at how the context treats it respectively. However, the thing is that the exemplary "Soon i will become CEO" is basing itself not on grammatical reasons but lexic ones. Meaning, we judge the so-called "tense" by an individual word that isn't part of the main SOV structure. If we look at "I will do it", the simplest you can go while retaining a simple sentence is "I will", which means the module verb here is distinct by itself. I don't know if you can do the same in German, but you can do so in English. The context is of course lost and the sentence has no meaning, but as long as it is grammatically correct, it seems to be fine. I henceforth think the simplest concept of "tense" can still be retained at the expense of the context, making it a very seperate grammatical structure
That's just one of the quirks the english language has, that it can answer questions with auxuliary verbs, since stranding auxiliaries is such a prominent feature of the language.
Lmao, this came out as I was rereading my books on TAM.
LADS!, is it unnatural to change every word with JUST suffixes?!