@morphail
It’s interesting, but why doesn’t it address “going to” and “about to”? Also, in a linguistics class I took, the professor distinguished between “will” and “shall”, though I can’t for the life of me remember why he said they meant different things.
To me, this seems more like an issue of semantics. If you want to express something happening in the future, you still use “will”, “shall”, “going to”, “about to”, etc. When you translate the future tense from other languages, you use the same forms.
Here’s an interesting sentence from Wikipedia: “However, in all cases, the sentences are actually voiced in the present tense, since there is no proper future tense in English. It is the implication of futurity that makes these present tense auxiliary constructions amount to a compound future quasi-tense.”
Germanic languages seem to all do this. There is not inflection for future tense; it requires the usage of auxiliary verbs in present tense construction. Future tense is a function of present tense. I think then it depends on what you want to call it. Wikipedia claims that Germanic languages do not have a ”simple future tense”, but it is still a future tense.