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The future in the past is a grammatical tense where the time reference is in the future with respect to a vantage point that is itself in the past. In English, future in the past is not always considered a separate tense, but rather as either a subcategory of future [1] or past [2] tense and is typically used in narrations of past events:
Biblical Hebrew has a distinction between past and future tenses which is similar in form to those used in other Semitic languages such as Arabic and Aramaic. Gesenius refers to the past and future verb forms as Perfect and Imperfect, [18] respectively, separating completed action from uncompleted action. However, the usage of verbs in these ...
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 ...
The Romance languages (descendants of Latin) have past, present and future morphological tenses, with additional aspectual distinction in the past. French is an example of a language where, as in German, the simple morphological perfective past (passé simple) has mostly given way to a compound form (passé composé).
Most simple sentences in tensed languages exhibit absolute tense. For example, if Jane says "John went to the party", the use of the past tense (went) implies that the event (John's going) took place at a time which is in the past relative to the moment of Jane's uttering the sentence.
The past progressive is conveyed by the simple past form. The future can be conveyed by the auxiliary werden, which is conjugated for person and number; but often the simple non-past form is used to convey the future (in fact, werden is also used to mark an assumptive similar to dürfte, müsste 'should' and wohl 'arguably', such as when it is ...
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When would and should function as past tenses of will and shall, their usage tends to correspond to that of the latter verbs (would is used analogously to will, and should to shall). Thus would and should can be used with "future-in-the-past" meaning, to express what was expected to happen, or what in fact did happen, after some past time of ...