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Comment by eru | Hacker News Reader

To a first approximation, all human languages need to express similar things.

If you want to eg talk about the past or future, you can put the markers for the different times into your verbs (like English or German do with grammatical tenses) or you can put those markers into other parts of the sentence (like English or German also do).

Eg in colloquial English you can say 'tomorrow I go to the market' and be well understood. Even if in print you would put it as 'tomorrow, I will go to the market'.

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Or as my Thai lady would say "tomorrow I go to shop".

As I got a better understanding of why she spoke that way, because there weren't those structures in her native language, it made me do a lot of hard thinking about English and left me with a lot of unanswered questions, but tenses are useful. "l will be going to the barbers while I'm in town" – that's compact and informative and I'd like to know how a Thai speaker would render that.

Incidentally redundancy serves a useful purpose of error detection and rectification, just as much in human speech as in RAM.

I am familiar with a few south east asian languages and none would have any issue expressing "I will be going to the barbers while I'm in town" ... I think even in English if a second language speaker said "I go to barber while I in town", it's still possible to understand.

Regarding redundancy, I so think that it's important and other languages have other ways of handling it. I know that Vietnamese for example very often doubles up the verbs for example for "help" it's common to say giúp đỡ together although both these words individually also mean help.

Hmm I think translating that faithfully will need a bit more context. But usually you can just say ตอนที่อยู่ในเมืองจะไปตัดผมด้วย translating to ‘whilst in town (will) go cut hair also’. The ‘จะ / will’ is a universal word that can be added to other verbs to signify ‘future in due course’.

'tomorrow I go to the market' and 'tomorrow, I will go to the market' mean slightly different things in English.

the first one is something like "I have it in my calendar" or "that's the plan" or "as is routine"

the second one is a declaration of current intention, in some cases emphasizing your determination.

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