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Originally Posted by martienne
How interesting! I speak (as foreign languages) English, French and Russian. I know a fair bit of a few other languages, but I would not quantify that as "fluent".
They certainly all have past and future, but it's interesting that the Easternmost one of these, Russian, has less complex tenses; they stick with just one for past, one for future.
But it's extremely complex in several other respects.
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Even in English it's probably more common to show future time by using present tense plus a time marker rather than by actually using future tense. "I'm going to the store tomorrow" is present tense (am going) but expresses future time; "I will go to the store tomorrow" is future tense.
It is kind of weird that we can't do this for past time: if "I am eating pizza" means I'm eating it now, and "I am eating pizza tomorrow" means I'll be eating it tomorrow, why can't we say "I am eating pizza yesterday" to show that we ate pizza yesterday?
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I'm a big fan of Esperanto (don't speak it, just love the idea) i.e. a language made up to have simple grammar, no exceptions and words with a Germanic, Roman or Slavic origin. We should drop English in the EU and use Esperanto instead. Fairer on everyone, nobody is at an advantage or disadvantage and no need to wast years of your life perfecting your English like many are forced to do. You can reach the same level in Esperanto on 1/5 of the time, apparently.
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I'm not really a fan of Esperanto, although I did learn a bit in HS. But I think that there are a couple of problems with it.
The first is that it is based on a false premise - that it is important to have an artificial language so that no one is at a "disadvantage" when speaking with a native speaker. The reality, though (and this may not have been the case when the language was developed in 1870-80) is that most people who've learned English as a second language have learned it to speak with people who have also learned it as a second language. That is, people in Sweden learn English so that they can speak to the Greek hotelier while on vacation in that country, and not particularly because they have a need to speak to Americans or British.
The idea of the "disadvantage" doesn't really hold up to scrutiny anyway. If I'm on vacation in Brussels and speak English to the French speaking waitress or hotel operator, there is no advantage of disadvantage in the conversation - I'm not going to get a cheaper room or a free dessert because I might speak English better. There is no competition going on where that would be a meaningful term: we are both just trying to communicate, and me asking if they have a room with a double bed is no different in English than it would be in Esperanto. (And of course to the extent I don't speak French, I'm at a disadvantage because I can't understand what the staff is saying among themselves).
The same lack of advantage/disadvantage would be true if I met someone at a coffee shop who didn't speak English and wanted to communicate with her - there is no competition, just an attempt to communicate.
Although none of this really matters - the actual reality is that English is already the world's lingua franca, and no one is going to really go for the idea of adopting a *second* lingua franca, particularly when English seems to be working quite well as such. (Although this, too, was not true in 1880, where you still needed to know German for science, English for business, French for international affairs, and where the one common second language had not yet been decided on.