I was told when taking Spanish many years ago that some languages lacked an Imperfect verb tense: I was eating my lunch, when he burst into the room. Or maybe it was past pluperfect: I had eaten lunch by 4pm that day.
If a language doesn’t have, say, an imperfect tense, how does one convey an incompleted event in the past? “I ate my lunch but didn’t finish when he burst in?”
Are there tenses in other languages that we don’t have?
Answering the first question, read some Damon Runyon to be impressed how much narrative it is possible to convey while using only the present tense. 
That sounds more like a GQ than anything mundane.
Anyway.
You’ve got it backwards - verb tenses are one of the most difficult to translate from one language to another accurately. Sure, most of the time you can get the idea accross more or less right, but verb tenses vary wildly from one language to another.
For instance: Chinese languages don’t have verb tenses per se. For instance “to go” in Mandarin is qu. You change the meaning of the verb by adding other words to the sentence. Qu le is usually explained as having a sense of completion. Sometimes this means past tense, as in qu le Zhongguo (went to China). Not always, though, which makes the verb + le construction effectively impossible to translate in English with a single verb tense.
In Japanese, there is no future tense. At all. You just use the present tense. Japanese also has tenses that have no equivalent in English. Like the causative and the passive causative.
Taberu = “to eat”
Tabesaseru = either “to allow (someone) to eat” or “to make (someone) eat”
Tabesaserareru = “be made/allowed to eat”
As you can see, you can still express the thought but there isn’t a perfect English equivalent. How about this example of the past passive tense in Japanese:
Ame = rain, furu = to fall (as in rain or snow)
Ame ga furu = “Rain is falling”
Ame ni furareta= “I was rained” (?)
You can also combine tenses to have truly bizarre tenses that are possible though rarely used. Try passive + causative passive form of taberu (to eat):
Taberaresaserareru
I don’t even want to try to fit that in a sentence, but it’s “legal” gramatically.
Then, there’s the whole deal of verbs changing forms depending on the relationship you have with the person you’re talking about. I’m not sure, you’d strictly qualify that as “tense” as it doesn’t denote a time relationship, but you could argue to the contrary.
Jovan points out about Japanese:-
“As you can see, you can still express the thought but there isn’t a perfect English equivalent. How about this example of the past passive tense in Japanese:
Ame = rain, furu = to fall (as in rain or snow)
Ame ga furu = “Rain is falling”
Ame ni furareta= “I was rained” (?)”
The last one, Ame ni furareta “I was rained” actually means “It rained on me and I was pissed off by it.” So you can also say “Akachan ni nakareta” (I was cried by the baby) and it really means, “The baby cried and pissed me off”.
My friend calls it the “been and gone and done it” tense. Brilliant!
Like “Nikki ga Imoto ni yomareta!” My little sister went and read my diary! wail!"
The passive tense in Japanese most definitely rocks. I don’t know how I manage to live so long without using - or even knowing it!
IIRC Indonesian has no tenses.
Russian has only three tenses: present, past and future. In order to distinguish further, it uses ‘aspects’, perfective and imperfective. The perfective aspect describes actions that are completed (like the French perfect tense) and the imperfective is for those that are ongoing in the past (the equivalent of the French imperfect tense).
[Russian words and phrases are transliterated, of course]For example, the Russian for “to read” is cheetat in the imperfective and procheetat in the perfective. Thus,
On cheetal kneegoo = He was reading a book.
On procheetal kneegoo = He read (and finished) a book
Similarly for the future tense.
Also, Russian does not distinguish the pluperfect tense (‘I had read’). It has to be inferred from the context. Finally, the present tense can be used for actions which went on in the past and are still ongoing (I have known hom since childhood; I have been working on this essay since Tuesday).
Koine Greek has an aorist tense, for simple action in the past (sort of), but looked at as a whole. Sort of.
This does not occur in English.
Regards,
Shodan
And what’s even more fun is that the present tense f the verb “to be” is rarely used at all, except for emphasis. So you end up saying really deep things like “I American.”
To give an example you might encounter if you follow Malacandra’s advice:
I’m sitting there eating, and I’m not even half done when in walks Nicely-Nicely Jones. And he says to me, “Youse had better find that dough–or another woild in which to live”.
Thanks for the replies and not slamming me for mistakenly posting this in MPSIMS. It’s another Straight Dope edumacation.
So who’s written work on this subject? It interests me greatly. They say thoughts lead to feelings; how does language map to thought? It takes me back to Orwell’s 1984, where the government was working to control the people by paring down the language, eliminating words such as “freedom.”
Does the Japanese lack of future tense tend to steer them away from emphasizing the future as much as English speakers? (Naturally they can think about and discuss the future without the tense). Maybe the language evolved that way from the culture, but does language create a cultural inertia once its in place?
Random Tense Trivia: Technically speaking, English doesn’t have a future tense: only past and non-past. Since we compose the “future” using a present tense verb plus an infinitive, technically we have a future aspect, which you can also apply to the past: “It was 1869. Manitoba would join Confederation the subsequent year.”
We just got convinced we have a future tense due to the use of Latin grammatical vocabulary to discuss our grammar even when it doesn’t exactly work. By contrast, French and Spanish really have future tenses: “Fui, soy, seré” - I was, I am, I will be.
Of course, in French it’s more common to express both the past and the future (especially the past) with composed tenses: j’ai été (instead of je fus); je vais être (instead of je serai).
To make matters worse, in Catalan you use the same auxiliary to make both the past and the future: Vaig sortir (I went out), vaig a sortir (I will go out).
As for the imperfect, Esperanto lacks it. If you can’t get it from context (“Mi legis kiam li venis hejmen” - I was reading when he came home), you can use a progressive aspect (“Mi estis leganta kiam…” I was reading when…) or the suffix -ad- (“Mi legadis kiam…” I was continuing-to-read when…)
I think one can still make the argument that English has three tenses–present, past, and past perfect. True, the past perfect requires an auxiliary verb–to have–but it still possesses its own form, which is now only seen in irregular verbs.
Speaking of which, it really grates on my ears when people say “Have came”, or “Have ran”, or “that program has not been ran”.
I don’t really see participles as verb tenses, per se. You can’t say he came, he come, he comes. Furthermore, you can use participles as adjectives: the beaten man, the running man.
Now try considering voices. Like Active, Passive, Optative…
I wasn’t really aware any language had a “future tense”. In English you’d say something like, “I want to go to the mall today”, or, “I have a test tomorrow”, or “Mom is going to karaoke tonight”. There’s no actual “future tense”, your sentences are simply propositions and/or intentions. Japanese does the same thing.
Perfect/imperfect isn’t really a tense; it’s an aspect - and I couldn’t explain it if i tried. Suffice it to say, English doesn’t have an imperfect tense; your example is past progressive (I was eating, he was walking, etc.); English also uses “would” or “used to” in circumstances that would merit the use of the imperfect in Spanish - “Cuando era joven, iba a la playa cada día.” “When I was young, I would go to the beach every day.” Neither of these is an imperfect per se either.
The point is that there’s no one-to-one mapping of verb tenses from language to language. French, for instance, uses “composé” tenses where Spanish would use simple tenses, and so “j’ai mangé” doesn’t necessarily translate to “he comido”. English actually has quite the simple tense system compared to the Romance languages, but simpler yet is Chinese (see examples given in an earlier post.) The bottom line is that languages vary in what they emphasize, and how much they expect to be gleaned from context. That’s why a sentence like “I’m eating lunch with Joe tomorrow” makes sense, even if it’s in the present tense.
Um, there’s definitely a future tense in romance languages. Like I said: yo fui, yo soy, yo seré. You can make periphrastic constructions around it using other tenses (mañana voy a Sitges, voy a ir a Sitges), and sometimes it’s used to mean other things (alguién llama, será Antonio - someone’s calling, it’s probably Antonio), but I’m not sure what you’d call it besides a future tense.
There’s definitely a future tense in the Celtic languages too (for example Irish: déanann sé, he does, déanfaidh sé he will do). In fact I think Welsh has two different future tenses, but I don’t know enough about the language to explain them.
Thai has no verb tenses. It sounds like Chinese may be similar from jovan’s explanation. To have any tense you add words that connotate time. For example:
I go.
I go tomorrow.
I go yesterday.