AI? But Arabic has no future — 2 of 2

By the Tutors Unit

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

In our previous story, we say that Arabic has no future, no future tense, we mean. And that when we talk about the future, we either add a prefix to the verb in present or use the conditional mood.

There are limited structures of the two clauses that are constructing the conditional mood in Arabic:

• Verbal sentence uses the present tense, verbal sentence uses the present tense;
• Verbal sentence uses the past tense, verbal sentence uses the past tense;
• Verbal sentence uses the present tense, verbal sentence uses the past tense;
• Verbal sentence uses the past tense, verbal sentence uses the present tense;
• Verbal sentence uses the present tense, verbal sentence uses the present tense (prefixed by the consonant ف );
• Verbal sentence uses the past tense, verbal sentence uses the present tense (prefixed by the consonant ف ).

And so, we are back to square one, circling around the past and the present tenses.

Perhaps, the future is too obvious to be structured.

Come as no surprise, other Germanic languages “as well as English”, use the “present” to talk about the future by adding a word or a phrase

In Germanic languages, including English, a common expression of the future is using the present tense, with the futurity expressed using words that imply future action (I go to Berlin tomorrow or I am going to Berlin tomorrow). There is no simple (morphological) future tense as such. However, the future can also be expressed by employing an auxiliary construction that combines certain present tense auxiliary verbs with the simple infinitive (stem) of the main verb. These auxiliary forms vary between the languages. Other, generally more informal, expressions of futurity use an auxiliary with the compound infinitive of the main verb (as with the English is going to …)… from Wikipedia

Remind you of something? Oh yeah… Inshallah.

In short, to be firm when you talk about the future in Arabic or perhaps any other language, talk about it if it “were past or present”.

And the AI in our classrooms, in our LMSs and apps is present and soon “is going to” be past.

For us, the future is another form of the present… or the past. And if this is the case, Who needs a future tense?