Tense

From KneeQuickie

The word "tense" is also used to describe vowels. If you're looking for information on tense vowels, see tenseness.

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Tense is a way of altering verbs to specify their location in time. This specification is always relative, either to a supposed "present moment" or to the time of another verb. In Indo-European languages, the most important tenses are relative to the present moment; these are the past, present and future tenses. Zompist's Cadhinor is an example of a language with a past anterior tense, locating an action as before the time being spoken about (the opposite would be posterior). In some languages, the anterior/posterior distinction is the main tense distinction, more important than or even replacing the past/future distinction.

Another distinction that can be expressed with tense is remoteness: it is possible for a language to have different tenses for events in the remote past, the near past, the near future, and the remote future. Languages do not always have symmetrical tense systems; a language may distinguish remoteness in the past but not the future (like Zompist's Verdúrian), for example.

Another possibility is to reduce the number of tense distinctions. English has only the past and non-past tenses; the present and future tenses have collapsed into a single tense, and the future is now expressed with an auxiliary (the word "will"). Indeed, a language need not make a mandatory tense distinction at all.

Many conlangs (and not so many natlangs) have a "timeless" tense (sometimes, as in Quenya, called the aorist) for verbs that belong to no particular time: for example, "Propan-2-ol has the chemical formula CH₃CHOHCH₃".

Tense should not be confused with aspect, which refers to the way an event is distributed through the temporal continuum. Many of the "tenses" mentioned in grammars are in fact combinations of tense and aspect, and sometimes also mood. (Examples of this are the perfect and continuous, which are really aspects.)

Past tenses

The past tense is often joined with aspect to yield past perfective and past imperfective tenses.

Future tenses

The hodiernal future tense (Latin hodie, today) is a future tense that indicates that an event "will occur today"—that is, the event occurs at a point between the moment of utterance and the end of the day.

The English equivalent of the hodiernal future would be using the future tense with the adverb today.