# I was going to do it (future)



## Abu Talha

In English, sometimes I say "I was going to" for a future action, e.g.,

"Have you done X?"
"No, I was going to do it when I get home."

This is different from saying "I will do it when I get home" because the latter indicates that I  have formed my intention right now to do it when I get home, whereas the former indicates that I had already intended, at some earlier point, to do this when I get home.
BTW, I'm actually unsure whether this is grammatically correct in English.

EDIT: Perhaps correct English might be: "I was thinking about /planning on doing it when I get home".

Do you have a similar way of expressing this in Standard Arabic? How about نويت\أردت أن أفعله حين أصل إلى البيت? Is this idiomatic?

Or, given that Arabic does not deal with tenses like English does, the most normal way to say this might be to just use the future tense: سأفعله حين أصل إلى البيت. 

Here is a thread which is similar, but different because here I am asking for a common idiomatic expression versus a strict translation: 
Something that would change/was going to change my life

Thanks.

عيدكم مبارك يا جماعة! أ


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## radosch

i do not think you can say that way in English but we need a native speaker here to judge.i think that the whole sentence is actually a subordinated clause missing the second part??? as for the arabic sentence you are right but instead of حين i would use  عندما


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## lukebeadgcf

> BTW, I'm actually unsure whether this is grammatically correct in English.



Do you mean the sentences themselves or your grammatical explanation. There is nothing wrong with the sentences, and your explanations seem fine to me, but I am not an expert in English grammar.



> "No, I was going to do it when I get home."



To convey the "I was going to," you could try using the كان plus a future-tense verb:

لا كنت سأفعله لدى وصولي إلى البيت.


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## radosch

yes , at first glance the sentence seemed to me as if it was subordinated and uncomplete...actually it is correct......the use of kanna  plus a future tense is also very interesting even though i do not see that construction very often so it would be nice if somebody whose native language is arabic would comment on this tense usage in arabic..very interesting


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## rayloom

^Interestingly, this construction never appears in the Quran, but it does appear in Classical Arabic literature (a hadith I remember "فمن كان سيقاتل العدو"*).
Otherwise, it's a very common construction in general. If you google كان سـ + pretty much any common verb (of course also with variations of كان), you'll find thousands of hits.
In colloquial Arabic, you'll find a similar construction as well كان + راح/رايح/حـ/هـ.

Quranic Arabic commonly uses a construction كان + a functioning participle (for the affirmative), or ما كان لـ + verb (subjunctive) for the negative (Sibawayh makes a fleeting reference to كان سيفعل when explaining the negative subjunctive construction of ما كان ليفعل).

Anyways, for the negative it's also possible to use ما كان سـ (or لم يكن سـ), or ما كان + participle (occurs also in the Quran وَمَا كَانَ اللَّهُ مُعَذِّبَهُمْ وَهُمْ يَسْتَغْفِرُونَ).

Sorry for the "not so organized" answer!

---------------------------
* أثر عن ابن مسعود رضي الله عنه


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## radosch

^that is exactly what i was searching for! very interesting....! now i think that sibawayh did not apply his كان سيفعل to any context and did not even quote any example of such tense or demonstrate its existence in any الجملة المفيدة but in one sentence where he tries to substitute the meaning of لو and describes it as وأما لو فلما كان سيقع لوقوع غيره.


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## rayloom

^I think the reason for that (lack of examples, even though grammar books are usually full of them) is because classical grammars of Arabic didn't treat the "auxillary + verb" as a different entity from the "to be + subj + predicate". So even though in practice, Arabic has these complex tenses, you don't find a mention of them in classical grammars. Even at school, we were only taught the classical 3 aspect system ماضي مضارع أمر.
Pretty much only in later grammars (due to comparison with western grammatical tradition) can you find such categorization of tenses in Arabic.

It's possible to identify in Arabic:
فعل he did
كان (قد) فعل he had done
كان يفعل he was doing
كان سيفعل he was going to do
يفعل he does, he's doing
سيفعل he will do
سيكون (قد) فعل he will have done
سيكون يفعل he will be doing

لفعل he would've done
لكان فعل he would've done
لكان يفعل he would've been doing
ليفعلـ(ن) he would do

(not including the imperative nor the usage of participles)

If you search for these, you'll find them being used (now as well as before), even though we don't formally learn such forms in school.


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## Abu Talha

Thanks everyone for your most helpful replies. There is one point on which I would like some further clarification, if possible.

In English, I use "I was going to" (1) for a *future* action that was to be completed in the *past* AND (2) for a *future* action that is to be completed in the *future*. The attached figure may explain it better.



In both (1) and (2), the person says "I was going to do it..." at t=0. 
In (1) the intention was formed at t=-2, and the person was to get home to do it at t=-1, i.e., before he said "I was going to do it when I got home".
In (2) the intention was also formed at t=-2, and the person was to get home to do it at t=1, i.e., after he said "I was going to do it when I get home".

Can the Arabic كنت سأفعله be used for both meanings too? Would the complete sentence be identical in both cases?

Thanks.
---



lukebeadgcf said:


> Do you mean the sentences themselves or your grammatical explanation. There is nothing wrong with the sentences, and your explanations seem fine to me, but I am not an expert in English grammar.


I was just wondering whether the sentence should rather be "I was going to do it when I *got* home." and that this should be valid for both (1) and (2) above.


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## radosch

Thank you very much  for further interpretation of the English sentence, I was a bit confused, I even thought that something was missing.
Afor Arabic, I still think that لا كنت سأفعله لدى وصولي إلى البيت     doesn't convey the right meaning.

لا كنت اريد ان افعله عندما اكون قد وصلت الى البيت now what do you think about that? Now I need some comments from native Arabic speakers  to see if the above given  example is grammatically correct and how is it supposed to be made correct and to sound real Arabic. In this example, I think the person has not arrived home as yet.........or?


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## rayloom

daee said:


> In English, I use "I was going to" (1) for a *future* action that was to be completed in the *past* AND (2) for a *future* action that is to be completed in the *future*. The attached figure may explain it better.
> View attachment 8569
> [...]



I didn't quite get the graph. But I think I got the idea.

Something like:

Situation 1: What did you do? (what were you going to do?)
I was going to study
(but I didn't)
كنت سأذاكر
 (لكني لم أفعل) 

Situation 2: What are you going to do?
I was going to study,
(but I'm not going to)
كنت سأذاكر
 (لكني لن أفعل.) 

Right?


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## إسكندراني

كنت سأفعل is exactly how I'd say it.
What springs to mind from the قرآن is هَمَّت طَّائِفَتَانِ مِنكُمْ أَن تَفْشَلَا.


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## Abu Talha

Thanks radosch, rayloom, and إسكندراني.


rayloom said:


> Situation 1: What did you do? (what were you going to do?)
> I was going to study
> (but I didn't)
> كنت سأذاكر
> (لكني لم أفعل)
> 
> Situation 2: What are you going to do?
> I was going to study,
> (but I'm not going to)
> كنت سأذاكر
> (لكني لن أفعل.)


I think that's possibly the same. However, would you say
هل ذاكرتَ بعدُ؟
كنتُ سأذاكر غدًا.
for "Have you studied yet?", "I was going to study tomorrow." i.e., I had already planned on studying tomorrow. In this case, there is no "but" or anything that indicates that things proceeded contrary to expectations. The speaker had always intended to study tomorrow.


radosch said:


> لا كنت اريد ان افعله عندما اكون قد وصلت الى البيت now what do you think about that?


This seems like the intended meaning I was going for. (Except the أكون قد وصلت seems overly complicated?) Also awaiting natives and others to comment.


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## إسكندراني

^Both of your suggestions are fine, and not 'overly-complicated'.


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## Abu Talha

Thanks إسكندراني.


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## Ibn Nacer

Please, what is the meaning of "I was going to" in French ?

Does that mean "J'allais le faire" ?

Merci.


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## cherine

Oui.


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## Ibn Nacer

Merci Cherine.


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## Ruh Muhaccer

rayloom said:


> ^Interestingly, this construction never appears in the Quran, but it does appear in Classical Arabic literature (a hadith I remember "فمن كان سيقاتل العدو"*).
> Otherwise, it's a very common construction in general. If you google كان سـ + pretty much any common verb (of course also with variations of كان), you'll find thousands of hits.
> In colloquial Arabic, you'll find a similar construction as well كان + راح/رايح/حـ/هـ.
> 
> Quranic Arabic commonly uses a construction كان + a functioning participle (for the affirmative), or ما كان لـ + verb (subjunctive) for the negative (Sibawayh makes a fleeting reference to كان سيفعل when explaining the negative subjunctive construction of ما كان ليفعل).
> 
> Anyways, for the negative it's also possible to use ما كان سـ (or لم يكن سـ), or ما كان + participle (occurs also in the Quran وَمَا كَانَ اللَّهُ مُعَذِّبَهُمْ وَهُمْ يَسْتَغْفِرُونَ).
> 
> Sorry for the "not so organized" answer!
> 
> ---------------------------
> * أثر عن ابن مسعود رضي الله عنه


You're mixing up several things here.

Firstly: I did not find the hadith you were talking about. Just something in Kitab Al-Zuhd of ibn Al-Mubarak.

فوائد من كتاب الزهد لابن المبارك
عَن عامر أن معضدا وأصحابا له خرجوا من الكوفة ونزلوا قريبا يتعبدون فبلغ ذلك عَبد الله بن مَسْعود فأتاهم ففرحوا بمجيئه إليهم فقال لهم ما حملكم على ما صنعتم قالوا أحببنا أن نخرج من غمار الناس نتعبد فقال عَبد الله لو أن الناس فعلوا مثل ما فعلتم فمن كان يقاتل العدو وما أنا ببارح حتى ترجعوا

As you see it uses the imperfect. I ask you to look up whether there is such a hadith, and if you should be successful in your search please do not hesitate to share it.

Secondly your proof of "Google searches" is not very scholarly. There are a tons of questions that would need to be answered, a few of those: Who wrote the articles/books natives or non-natives? When was it written? Is it a quote being quoted, whereby it will of course occur more often, or is it a general usage. And many more.
I actually talked to a German Arabist professor about this (and attached the section of his book that discusses it).
He let a 200+ page master be written on the topic.
It is so recent a thing that you do not really find it in books older than 30 years. They found that the earliest sources were all translations. Translations of English to be precise. They could not track down the exact first one but that is what they found.



But even then, what has now entered the grammars for "Modern Standard Arabic" not Classical is a different usage and meaning as you can discern from the attached file. It only occurs in conjunction with adversative or conditional sentences and can be translated as "would have done". The reason why "was going to do" sometimes fits, is because they overlap in meaning.

What is interesting though is that Sibawayhi did indeed use it once.

... هِيَ حِرَفٌ لِمَا كَانَ سَيَقَعُ لِوُقُوعِ غَيْرِهِ . وَمَعْنَاهُ كَمَا قَالَ الصَّفَّارُ : أَنَّكَ إِذَا قُلْتَ : لَوْ قَامَ زَيْدٌ قَامَ عَمْرٌو دَلَّتْ

But he is not using it the way normative modern grammars have accepted it, the one that entered form English.
I asked the professor (Prof. Dr. Eckehard Schulz) to look into it, although he said he was very busy. If I get an answer I shall God willing posted here. However Sibawayh did not mention it talking about lam al-juhud as in "ma kana liyaf'ala" but when talking about the conditional particle "law".

Regardless, your remark about Quranic Arabic is right. The "kana + active participle" is the way it would have been classically expressed, which also has to do with the fact that Arabic has an aspect not tense system but I won't explain it here.



كنت قاتلا ابي ولكني منعت عن قتله

"I was going to/ would have kill(ed) my father, but I was prevented from murdering him."
Yes, it could also mean "I was killing my father, but ...". That is what I indicated above, the aspect system only differentiates between completeness and incompleteness of action. Since the killing either was in progress of taking place or just about to take place it is in both cases imperfective.






Even the "kana+imperfective" might mean "would have"
as you can see in the right-hand side picture.

Sometimes an unreal conditional sentence with "لو" does the work:








In short the translation of "was going to" is complicated and not so easy (which it also is in to German or Persian, those do not have a 1:1 equivalent as well). In subordinate clauses it might also just be the plain sawfa/sa+ imperfect like here:


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## Abu Talha

@Ruh Muhaccer Thanks for your informative reply. Would you mind listing the names of the reference works whose images are in your post?


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## Ruh Muhaccer

Abu Talha said:


> @Ruh Muhaccer Thanks for your informative reply. Would you mind listing the names of the reference works whose images are in your post?


Yes, of course. Some are from "A Student Grammar of Modern Standard Arabic" by Prof. Dr. Eckehard.
And more importantly some are from "A Grammar of Classical Arabic" by Wolfdietrich Fischer, the best one to be found in English in my honest opinion. If you have further questions do not hesitate to write to me personally. Greetings.


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## Abu Talha

Ruh Muhaccer said:


> Yes, of course. Some are from "A Student Grammar of Modern Standard Arabic" by Prof. Dr. Eckehard.
> And more importantly some are from "A Grammar of Classical Arabic" by Wolfdietrich Fischer, the best one to be found in English in my honest opinion. If you have further questions do not hesitate to write to me personally. Greetings.


Thank you very much.


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