It is known that PIE had no grammatical future tense.
As such, I wonder how future events were expressed in PIE. Whether they used go-periphrasis, desiratives or a form of the root bheudh- (grow, develop)?
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1 Answer
The reference to future was inferred from the context, much like in today's German: Ich arbeite morgen nicht (I won't work tomorrow). The adverb "tomorrow" indicates that the speaker conveys a future event. Without a semantic clue in the sentence, the preceding discourse might be an indication.
The go-periphrasis is a much later development.
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4While the disagreement among the daughter languages as to how to form a future certainly strongly implies that there was no future tense, I'm wondering how Atamiri can state this so dogmatically. How do we know what syntax they used? Nov 14, 2013 at 19:14
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What is the evidence that the subjunctive - the PIE general irrealis mood - was not used for the future? Nov 15, 2013 at 7:55