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by Florin_Andrei 5507 days ago
> There's no future tense in Finnish

Huh, really? How do they express phrases that refer to future events?

4 comments

In German at least, the future exists, but is rarely used unless it is necessary to disambiguate. For example, you would just say, Ich fahre morgen mit meinem Auto in die Schweiz. Lit. translated: I drive tomorrow with my car in/to Switzerland. More idiomatically translated: I will (or I'm going to) drive in my car to Switzerland tomorrow. I assume it's the same in Finnish, but it might not be because Finnish isn't even a Indo-European language.

N.B: I just finished my first semester of German. Please someone correct me if I am anyway wrong.

With a telic object [1] or through context (i.e. "tomorrow").

1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telicity#Telicity_as_an_aspect

In some situations, the difference lies in the case of the direct object (partitive vs genitive/accusative).

Otherwise, it's a matter of context.

Maybe that's why they are Finnish? (I kid!)