HEBREW TENSES ILLUSTRATED BY THOSE OF OTHER LANGUAGES.
ENGLISH.
PRIESTLEY writes:—"A little reflection may, I think, suffice to convince any person that we have no more business with a future tense in our language than we have with the whole system of Latin moods and tenses; because we have no modification of our verbs to correspond to it; and if we had never heard of a future tense in some other language, we should no more have given a particular name to the combination of the verb with the auxiliary shall or will, than to those that are made with the auxiliaries do, have, can, must, or any other."—English Grammar.
LATHAM writes:—" Notwithstanding its name, the present tense, in English, does not express a strictly present action; it rather expresses an habitual one. He speaks well=he is a good speaker. If a man means to say that he is in the act of speaking, he says, I am speaking. It has also, especially when combined with a subjunctive mood, a future power, I beat you (=I will beat you) if you don't leave off."—English Language, p. 455.
LINDLEY MURRAY writes:—"The present tense, preceded by the words when, before, after, as soon as, &c., is sometimes [often?] used to point out the relative time of a future action; as, 'When he arrives he will hear the news;' 'He will hear the news before he arrives;' or, 'As soon as he arrives,' or, 'At farthest, soon after he arrives;' 'The more she improves, the more amiable she will be.'
"In animated historical narratives, this tense is sometimes [always?] substituted for the imperfect tense; as, 'He enters the territory of the peaceful inhabitants, he fights and conquers, takes an immense booty, which he divides among his soldiers, and returns home to enjoy an empty triumph.'
The perfect tense, preceded by the words when, after, as soon as, &c., is often used to denote the relative time of a future action; as, 'When I have finished my letter, I will attend to his request;' 'I will attend to this business, as soon as I have finished my letter.'
"It is to be observed, that in the subjunctive mood ... the verb itself in the present, and the auxiliary both of the present and past-imperfect tenses, often carry with them somewhat of a future sense; as, 'If he come to-morrow, I may speak to him ; if he should or would come to-morrow, I might, could, would, or should speak to him.'
"Observe also, that the auxiliaries should and would, in the imperfect tenses, are used to express the present and future as well as the past: as, 'It is my desire, that he should, or would, come now, or to-morrow;' as well as, 'It was my desire, that he should or would come yesterday;' so that, in this mood, the precise time of the verb is very much determined by the nature and drift of the sentence."—Grammar, p. 116–119.
PICKBOURN writes:—"The first of these English tenses, viz., I write, is an aorist [?], or indefinite of the present time.
"Even those compound participles, which denote completed or finished actions, maybe applied to future, as well as past and present time. Thus: "Whenever that ambitious young prince comes to the throne, being supported by a veteran army, and having got possession of the treasures which will be [are] found in his father's coffers, he," &c.—English Verb, p. 111.
MARSH writes:—"It is a curious fact that the Romance languages, as well as the Romaic, at one period of their history, all rejected the ancient inflected futures, and formed new compound or auxiliary ones, employing for that purpose the verbs will and shall', or have in the sense of duty or necessity, though French, Italian, Spanish and Portuguese, have now agglutinated the infinite and auxiliary into a simple future.
"Why is it that the Gothic languages have always possessed a past tense, never a future? Why did the Romance dialects retain the Latin past forms, and reject the Latin future?"
"If the expression of time is an inherent necessity of the verb, special forms for the future as well as the present and the past ought to be universal, but in most modern European languages, the future is a compound, the elements of which are a present auxiliary and an aorist infinitive, for in the phrases I shall go, he will go, shall and will are in the present tense, and go is aoristic.
"The Anglo-Saxon, with a single exception in the case of a substantive verb, had absolutely no mode of expressing the future by any verbal form, simple or compound. The context alone determined the time, and in German, in the Scandinavian dialects, and in English, we still very commonly, as the Anglo-Saxons did, express the future by a present. Ich gehe morgen nach London, I go, or I am going, to London to-morrow, are more frequently used by Germans and Englishmen, than ich werde gehen, I shall or will go; and the adverbial nouns morgen and to-morrow, not the verbs gehen and go, are the true time-words.
"The use of the present for the past, too, especially in spirited narrative and in poetry, is not less familiar, and in both these cases the expression of time belongs to the grammatical period, not to the verb."—Lectures, p. 204.
