Tenses, Past and Present

[steepholm]

First, a brief word from our sponsor...

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We now return you to your regular maundering.

When trying to explain the niceties of English grammar to my Japanese friends, one of the hardest concepts to get across is the use of the pluperfect tense (the perfect is no pushover either). Japanese only has two tenses, you see: past and present/future. How do you explain the pluperfect to someone coming from that starting place? I normally end up having to draw a little timeline with three positions on it, a bit like this:

X (me now [present])--- Y (me two days ago [simple past]) --- Z (me last week - [pluperfect])

We use the pluperfect, I explain, when X wants to say something about Z from Y's point of view. As, for example, when I (X) talk about how I (Y) realised that I (Z) had forgotten to cancel the milk. At this point their eyes glaze over. Why do we need a whole tense for such an abstruse situation? Would it really be confusing if we just put it in the simple past, i.e.: "I realised I forgot to cancel the milk"?

And of course one does hear that latter construction, increasingly frequently, in speech. Is it also entering written English? This post was occasioned by my seeing an American book called Things I Wish I Knew Before Going To Japan. That gave me a bit of a start. If it had appeared in an essay, I would certainly have corrected it to "Things I Wish I Had Known Before Going to Japan" - but which seems better/more natural to you? Is the pluperfect dying out? If so, is its demise a primarily American phenomenon, as yet? Should we mourn it?

Comments

[sovay]

If it had appeared in an essay, I would certainly have corrected it to "Things I Wish I Had Known Before Going to Japan" - but which seems better/more natural to you?

The use of the pluperfect. The other looks temporally flattened and wrong.

[steepholm]

Thank you.

[colorwheel]

ditto.

[thistleingrey]

Pluperfect to me is pure usage--mood and aspect, as conuly says downthread. Old English didn't have pluperfect as a formalization, and present/future tended to be the same on the page. Adverbial and prepositional futzing is largely post-1200 CE. That said, this US-based person of somewhat confused linguistic usage has no qualms about putting +1 to sovay's remark.

[cmcmck]

I have enough bogglement with the French future pluperfect! :o)

I still recall being in Dijon in a deli with a bunch of Japanese tourists being served before us.

They fondly believed they were speaking French.

Madam la patronne gave us a look an asked us (in French as we'd been using it to each other just before) 'what language are they speaking?'

There was a time foreign languages seem to have been rather badly taight in Japan.Is this still the case?

[steepholm]

From what I understand, English at least is still badly taught. (And that's the language everyone learns - you'd think it might be Chinese.) The principle seems to be, to misquote Elvis, "a little less conversation, a little more rote learning of abstract grammar principles."

[redbird]

"I realized I forgot to cancel the milk" feels entirely normal; that book title should be "I had known."

But I think the problem isn't (or isn't only) that the title uses the simple past "knew" instead of "had known," but that it uses present tense "wish" instead of "wished." At least, I assume these are things the author wished they'd been aware of while in Japan, not "I got home from Japan and then realized it would have been useful to know this."

I'm a New Yorker, so yes, reporting American usage; I'm also a copyeditor, so perhaps paying more attention to this sort of thing than average.

[shewhomust]

I don't have a problem with 'wish': I (present) reflect on my (past) time in Japan, and wish (now) that I (before I set off, so further past) had known ... 'I wished' implies it's all in the past, a matter for regret which can't be remendied; whereas 'I wish' ,eans 'don't you wish you could know these things? and you can! just buy my book!'

This may be overthinking it, but what it's addressing is my unforced reaction (UK usage, but then I'm someone who has been heard to use the past subjunctive in French).

[conuly]

English only has two tenses, the simple past and the present. Everything else is handled with mood and aspect.

/unnecessary pedant

[steepholm]

There's no such thing as unnecessary pedantry!