In Latin and Classical Greek, the future remote is a grammatical structure used to describe an alternative future, one that is different to the future that would simply play out from the present as it stands.
Now, and here’s the surprising thing, it is a grammatical construction often used in maths questions. This is how it appears. A mini-story is told in what is generally called a wordy question. There are numbers such as speeds, times, costs and exchange rates etc and these form the basis of the question. That done, some of the initial conditions are then altered and a second question is asked without the need to repeat the whole story as a new event. Bill is planning a journey. He says, “if I were to walk twice as quickly, I would need new shoes”. Is he correct? This is the future remote and for added effect, and common place in exams these days, it is also indirect speech!
You can just about spot these constructions in English because the hypothesis and speech act are marked by “if”, “would” and quotation marks. But spotting these signs whilst searching for relevant numbers can be very difficult.
Searching for these markers are difficult because they only appear once in a sentence and if you miss them the mood and structure of the sentence is ambiguous. Using these keywords and markers is a bit like seeing a signpost on a road for a vital turning and then not seeing a follow up leaving you wondering whether the turning has been missed or not. If you are reading complicated grammar in English and you miss the signs flagging up the structure, you don’t get duplicates and get lost basically. In Greek and Latin, future remote ,indirect speech and other forms have very clear markers. Vowels stretch, key words appear in sequence and the language seems to make it your business to know it is doing something strange. The road signs, to use a metaphor, are lit in flashing neon and repeated at frequent intervals.
Why oh why, therefore, do examiners use these constructions for maths when the English language can barely support them? Indeed the chatter of a playground and emoticons of children’s social media may even do a better job at signposting these speech acts than the flat and unemphatic use of language in many exams.
