(By Östen Dahl and Viveka Velupillai): "In English, the sentence It is cold tomorrow, with the present tense of the copula is, sounds strange: it is more natural to say It will (it’ll) be cold tomorrow or It is going to be cold tomorrow, using a future tense form. In Finnish, on the other hand, one may replace the adverb tänään ‘today’ in (1) with huomenna ‘tomorrow’, yielding (2) without any further changes in the sentence... ❡
The Present Tense can thus be used equally well for the present and the future in Finnish, in contrast to English, where it is often the case that auxiliary constructions such as shall/will+Verb and be going to+Verb must be used when speaking of the future. In many languages where future time reference is grammaticalized, the means employed is inflectional. Thus, in French, (3) and (4) differ in the form of the verb faire ‘(lit.) do’... ❡
It is relatively rare for a language to totally lack any grammatical means for marking the future. Most languages have at least one or more weakly grammaticalized devices for doing so. In this chapter, we have therefore decided to map only the inflectionally marked future tenses, inflectional marking being a relatively clear criterion (although there are some borderline cases where it is unclear if one is dealing with a clitic or an affix)."