The starry future
Was this post just an excuse to post the image above? Who can say? Such questions may never get answered, and that's ok.
If I ever become rich, the way I'd spread Esperanto is to funnel a boatload of funding into primary schools on the condition that they deliver Esperanto lessons in some capacity. It's so much less frustrating getting started with Esperanto than many other languages, so I reckon more progress would be made. Every child then becomes a grown up that might already have some grounding or at least take Esperanto more seriously.
Well, that and offer money to get Patrick Rothfuss to translate his works into Esperanto - my tweet attempt fizzled.
Sometimes in English we actually use the simple or continuous present tense to talk about future things. As far as I know at the moment, it's most often when something is scheduled in the future, either explicitly or implicitly:
The badgers meet the squirrels tomorrow (simple present)
The badgers are meeting the squirrels tomorrow (continuous present)
The meeting isn't happening now - it's tomorrow. The simple future tense would have been "will meet".
A more implicit example might be:
The badger king said, "at the meeting, we present our argument for forgiveness"
We're only explicitly talking about a meeting, but we know from context that the meeting is scheduled in the future (same with holidays, deadlines, etc.). Again, it would be fine to say "we will present" (future simple), but instead we have the more immediate present tense.
"Being Colloquial in Esperanto" by David Jordan suggests that in Esperanto we avoid this muddying of tenses, and favour sticking only to the future:
la meloj renkontos la sciurojn morgaŭ
the badgers will meet the squirrels tomorrow
la melreĝo diris, "ĉe la renkonto, ni prezentos nian argumenton por pardono"
the badger-king said, "at the meeting, we will present our argument for forgiveness"
To be fair the wording is "less common in Esperanto", so it does make me wonder how people would have read "renkontas", and whether they would have seen that as simply an error - or whether it would have been natural.
I haven't so far succeeded in finding an equivalent discussion in the holy PMEG.
But even as part of me was thinking "isn't that refreshingly simple", another ever-fussy part wondered what else Esperanto might do to achieve the feeling of more immediacy that is given by using the present tense. Perhaps I'm clinging to a pointless distinction!
