AI? But Arabic has no future — 1 of 2

By the Tutors Unit

Veel plezier met het lezen van het Nederlandse verhaal… door Valeria Doornkamp

“Inshallah!” is one of the first words that the learner of the Arabic language -or someone who just landed on an Arabic country with no intention to learn the language- unavoidably learns. It literally means if God wills.

Contextualize meanings, on the other hand, are a different story. It could mean: Will happen, is definitely happening, probably happening, just wait for it to happen, or even, nothing will happen at all.

As the learner advances in learning the language and gets into the serious stuff, grammar for instance, they tend to learn the present tense followed by the past tense. And that pretty much is it in the matter of verb tenses. The Arabic language has no future tense.

The future tense is replaced by what is understood in English for example as the imperative mood.

Wondering how we talk about the future in Arabic? When it comes to the structure, we add a prefix (usually constructed of a number of specific consonants) to the verb in the present tense and, voila, you get your action in the future.

However, by adding phrases such as “Inshallah”, “Bi ithinellah”… etc, you easily turn your verb tense into the near future… or any other future you shoot for!

The future to us, is not a thing to talk about, proactively. it will happen, whether we like it or not, whether we want it or not, and all under God willing, so why bother?

Makes sense? Indeed.

But what about those of us, and probably our ENTIRE learners, who are planning for and talking about the future (let AI alone) vividly?

You have two options to talk and think about it:

Either you use the prefix like the rest us, or you talk about you to-be actions as if they were happening now (in the present) or in the past!

And the linguistics has a name for such a structure, called the conditional mood.

Which we WILL talk about in our next story… “Inshallah” :)