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The simple past or past simple, sometimes also called the preterite, consists of the bare past tense of the verb (ending in -ed for regular verbs, and formed in various ways for irregular ones, with the following spelling rules for regular verbs: verbs ending in -e add only –d to the end (e.g. live – lived, not *liveed), verbs ending in -y ...
Apart from what are called the simple present (write, writes) and simple past (wrote), there are also continuous (progressive) forms (am/is/are/was/were writing), perfect forms (have/has/had written, and the perfect continuous have/has/had been writing), future forms (will write, will be writing, will have written, will have been writing), and ...
The form of the will/shall future described above is frequently called the simple future (or future simple). Other constructions provide additional auxiliaries that express particular aspects : the future progressive (or future continuous ) as in "He will be working"; the future perfect as in "They will have finished"; and the future perfect ...
However other state verbs use the present progressive or present simple depending on whether the state is considered temporary or permanent: The pen is lying on the table; Paris lies on the Seine. For past actions or states, the simple past is generally used: He went out an hour ago; Columbus knew the shape of the world.
Finnish and Hungarian, both members of the Uralic language family, have morphological present (non-past) and past tenses. The Hungarian verb van ("to be") also has a future form. Turkish verbs conjugate for past, present and future, with a variety of aspects and moods. Arabic verbs have past and non-past; future can be indicated by a prefix.
The past tense (simple past or past progressive) of the condition clause is historically the past subjunctive. In modern English this is identical to the past indicative , except in the first and third persons singular of the verb be , where the indicative is was and the subjunctive were ; was is sometimes used as a colloquialism ( were ...
In Latin, most verbs have four principal parts.For example, the verb for "to carry" is given as portō – portāre – portāvī – portātum, where portō is the first-person singular present active indicative ("I carry"), portāre is the present active infinitive ("to carry"), portāvī is the first-person singular perfect active indicative ("I carried"), and portātum is the neuter supine.
In at least the East Slavic and West Slavic languages, there is a three-way aspect differentiation for verbs of motion with the determinate imperfective, indeterminate imperfective, and perfective. The two forms of imperfective can be used in all three tenses (past, present, and future), but the perfective can only be used with past and future.