The promissive future verb is will. Nevertheless, it is only used in the first person. The second and third persons are expressed by the predictive verb shall.
"In primis personis shall simpliciter prædicentis est; will, quasi promittentis aut minantis.
"In secundis et tertiis personis, shall promittentis est aut minantis: will simpliciter prædicentis.
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nempe, hoc futurum prædico.
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nempe, hoc futurum spondeo, vel faxo ut sit."
Again—"would et should illud indicant quod erat vel esset futurum: cum hoc tantum discrimine: would voluntatem innuit, seu agentis propensionem: should simpliciter futuritionem."—Wallis, p. 107.
[§ 589]. Archdeacon Hare explains this by a usus ethicus. "In fact, this was one of the artifices to which the genius of the Greek language had recourse, to avoid speaking presumptuously of the future: for there is an awful, irrepressible, and almost instinctive consciousness of the uncertainty of the future, and of our own powerlessness over it, which, in all cultivated languages, has silently and imperceptibly modified the modes of expression with regard to it: and from a double kind of litotes, the one belonging to human nature generally, the other imposed by good-breeding on the individual, and urging him to veil the manifestations of his will, we are induced to frame all sorts of shifts for the sake of speaking with becoming modesty. Another method, as we know, frequently adopted by the Greeks was the use of the conditional moods: and as sentiments of this kind always imply some degree of intellectual refinement, and strengthen with its increase, this is called an Attic usage. The same name too has often been given to the above-mentioned middle forms of the future; not that in either case the practice was peculiar to the Attic dialect, but that it was more general where the feelings which produced it were