vestiges of gender and case in English

[Lionel Mandrake]

7. I would argue a few points, including "arguably".

Syntactically it's clear that "would" is the past tense of "will", and similarly for the other pairs of modals. Historically, it's clear that "would" was the past tense of "will", etc. But semantically, the meaning of "I would like to eat now" is in the present, not the past.

Modals in English and German are similar, except that in German they have infinitives and participles. English "I must" corresponds to German "ich musste", which is the past tense of "ich muss". This suggests that English "must" should be considered past tense.

Wie sagt man auf Deutsch: "I knew they would go"? (I'm wondering how similar the English and German versions are.)

Syntactically English has no future tense. Future meaning in English is always expressed paraphrastically: I'm going to eat, I will eat, I'm about to eat, etc.