General and fairly short answer: Indo-European languages generally have two tenses: past and non-past. The non-past (what you call the present) can be used for the future, though depending on the ...

Depending on how you analyze it, Trique may have as many as 15 tones, built from 5 pitch levels.

Well, Mark covered a lot of what I would have said. So I'll simply add a couple other types of rhyming and languages that prefer them: Biblical Hebrew was fond of rhyming of ideas, where consecutive ...

Prepositions are one obvious answer. English doesn't need to mark its object because of its SVO order, but it does mark most other roles with prepositions, and you can easily imagine a language that ...

I think it was Longacre that suggested the English perfect can not be fully analyzed as an aspect, but must be understood to carry a role in discourse: namely, it marks background information that ...

I'm not sure if I should really call this an "answer", but I've conducted thought experiments in the past on rendering English in an ideographic writing system. The strategy I used was to break up ...

Languages that rely heavily on context, such as Japanese, usually do that because of pressure to be more efficient with utterance time. Japanese has very simple syllable structure and so needs many ...

While not actual native text (and thus potentially lacking some of the subtleties of the grammar), I just ran across a site of possible interest: http://www.scriptureearth.org/ which contains Bible ...