Gentoo bans AI-created contributions

* Tense - Usually past, present, and future.
* Aspect - Simple ("perfective"), progressive (continuous), and perfect. Some languages have imperfect or other aspects, which English lacks.
* Mood or modality - Anything marked with a modal verb (the auxiliary verbs used for the progressive and perfect do not count as modal in this formalism). Sometimes subcategorized into indicative and subjunctive modalities (but we can further categorize into conditional, counterfactual, normative or deontic, etc.).
* Evidentiality - Not used in English, and for that matter not used in most/all Indo-European languages. Some languages mark verbs to indicate why the speaker believes the asserted fact to be true, for example distinguishing between something directly witnessed and something indirectly reported. Some authorities consider this an extension of modality.

One confusing thing about English is that English has no future tense in this formalism. The future is sometimes marked with the modal verb "will," so you could say that the future is a modality. But modalities are optional in a way that tenses are not, and so we can have sentences like "Tomorrow, I'm buying a new laptop," which is semantically happening in the future but has no grammatical marker indicating as much (and if you chop off the "tomorrow" prefix, it's a perfectly good present continuous sentence without a whiff of the future).

On the other hand, there are languages (such as Mandarin Chinese) that have only one tense in this formalism. Those languages either treat all time information as modal, or do not have grammaticalized time markers at all. Of course, speakers of those languages are perfectly capable of distinguishing between past, present, and future. Every language can do that. But in these languages, time information is truly optional. You can say "I buy a new laptop," as a discrete event (rather than the habitual or indefinite sense that English simple present would normally imply), without specifying when that happens.

Another "fun" property of English is do-support: There are some constructions in English which grammatically require a modal verb (e.g. turning a declarative sentence into a yes-no question), but modals are semantically optional in English, so the word "do" (or "does") is used as a placeholder when no modal is required. In general, English does a lot of fronting and other grammatical rearrangement when building different constructions, and I would imagine that this annoys speakers of Spanish just as much as Spanish verb conjugations tend to annoy speakers of English.

No, German has that, too. "I am working" would be "Ich bin arbeitend". Yes, this isn't used much and sounds a bit strange but it is valid. It strongly indicates "right at this very moment".

Now, to make things even more complicated: A male "worker" is a "Arbeiter" and a female worker is a "Arbeiterin". A worker or a group of workers with unknown, irrelevant or mixed gender would be "Arbeiter", too. But many people now reject the generic masculine.

So currently, several gender neutral forms compete with the old generic masculine and with each other. For plural, the substantivized form of the verb in the present continuous tense is often used: "Arbeitende".

So the seldom-used tense got a little revival lately.

I don't like it, because to me the natural interpretation of "Arbeitende" would be "people, who work at this very moment".

> And where do you see different present tenses?

Because they have completely different meanings?

"I am a programmer, I program" - it's my job, I do it all the time, I may - OR MAY NOT - be doing it right now (I'm not - I'm busy writing right now :-)

"I am programming" - I'm not, I'm not doing it now, I'm writing.

"I do (not) act" - this variant is almost always either emphatic or negative - and when negative it implies "never".

So the first variant is the continuous present, I may not be doing it right now but it happens past present and future. (In the positive it also does not necessarily imply "right now".)

The second variant is the present - it's happening right now.

The third variant - I'm not sure what it's called - is almost always used to imply "never".

Three clearly different meanings.

To jump on your mention of "English has "he goes" and "he went"", what do you understand by the two sentences

"Jim is going to the gym" and "Jim goes to the gym". I was taught they are two - clearly different - present tenses. Because they have two - clearly different - meanings.

Cheers,
Wol