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The prophetic perfect tense is a literary technique commonly used in religious texts [1] that describes future events that are so certain to happen that they are referred to in the past tense as if they had already happened.
In English grammar, the pluperfect (e.g. "had written") is now usually called the past perfect, since it combines past tense with perfect aspect. (The same term is sometimes used in relation to the grammar of other languages.) English also has a past perfect progressive (or past perfect continuous) form: "had been writing".
The have-perfect developed from a construction where the verb meaning have denoted possession, and the past participle was an adjective modifying the object, as in I have the work done. [15] This came to be reanalyzed, with the object becoming the object of the main verb, and the participle becoming a dependent of the have verb, as in I have ...
Relative tense and absolute tense are distinct possible uses of the grammatical category of tense. Absolute tense means the grammatical expression of time reference (usually past, present or future) relative to "now" – the moment of speaking. In the case of relative tense, the time reference is construed relative to a different point in time ...
Present perfect progressive (progressive, perfect): "I have been eating" (While many elementary discussions of English grammar classify the present perfect as a past tense, it relates the action to the present time. One cannot say of someone now deceased that they "have eaten" or "have been eating".
Similarly, a pluperfect tense such as "he had come" could either be a perfect in the past (implying that the man was still there), or a discontinuous past in the past (implying that the man had come earlier on but had now gone away again). In English the tense can have both meanings.
The past perfect, sometimes called the pluperfect, combines past tense with perfect aspect; it is formed by combining had (the past tense of the auxiliary have) with the past participle of the main verb. It is used when referring to an event that took place prior to the time frame being considered. [10]
Yiddish has gone even further and has no preterite at all. Rather, there is only one past tense, which is formed using what was originally perfect. [8] The dialect of German spoken in North America known as Pennsylvania German has also undergone this change with the exception of the verb to be, which still retains a simple past. [9]