If English only has 2 cases for most nouns (3 for many pronouns), then most verbs have two tenses. However, there are generally two more forms: the present and past participles. Go, went, going, gone. The past participle is in general the same as the past tense, but often differs in verbs with irregular past tenses. All other tenses and forms use auxiliary verbs, each of which traces its existence back to a standard verb and so linguistically create various types of verbal phrases. If you’re going to call a verb phrase a different tense, you should call every prepositional phrase a different case.
There are no specific dictionary words (are there?) that have an assigned neuter gender. It’s only every really used in the abstract, but I’d certainly never say that it’s only rarely used, at least in Mexico. “Lo que pasó es…” and similar constructs are pretty common.
Well, the fact that you can talk about different times in English doesn’t really say anything useful about English - you could equally well talk about different times in any other human language.
Consider the two following facts about Japanese:
- In Japanese, it is possible to talk about events in the future, the present, the past;
- In Japanese, verbs and adjectives have two tenses: we may refer to these as “past” and “non-past”.
Which do you think is more useful or informative?
If we’re going to be involving other languages… Latin is generally considered to have six tenses. The verb voco, in those tenses (for simplicity, only the first person singular indicative forms):
voco, vocabam, vocabo, vocavi, vocaveram, vocavero
Those are the active forms. Let us also look at the equivalent passive forms:
vocor, vocabar, vocabor, vocatus sum, vocatus eram, vocatus ero
Is it your opinion that Latin only has three tenses in the passive voice, even though those verb phrases correspond precisely in meaning to their one-word active brethren? Is that really the more useful and informative way of looking at it?
There’s nothing special about single word versus a verb phrase. If we so desired, we could delete the space and say that havecalled is the tense formed by adding the prefix “have-”.
Well, useful and informative is a matter of opinion. But in your example, it seems reasonable to say that Latin verbs have no pluperfect passive form, and that this gap is made up by using a phrase consisting of another verb and a participle, similar to how English deals with similar situations.
The prefix “have-” or “has-” and the suffix “-ed”. That’s not really how English works.
I think the first is more informative because it’s true. Japanese has several tenses.
Hanasu - present/future
Hanashita - past
Hanashite - subjunctive/imperative
Hanashiteiru - present progressive
Hanaseru - ability
And more. I think it’s ridiculous to say complex tenses aren’t tenses. If present progressive tense and past perfect tense aren’t tenses in English, what are they?
I think they are “modes”
I’ve heard that “went”, “was going”, “have gone”, “had been going”, etc. drives Russian ESLers to drink, because Russian doesn’t have such grammatical constructions that express these shades of meaning. Maybe they’re not tenses, but they are something that not every language has.
***
Re: history of English-- I’ve said more than once that English is the result of Norman soldiers trying to hook up with Saxon barmaids. Should I stop, since it isn’t a creole?
And many more indeed. However these (other than the first two on your list) are not usually considered tenses. In the case of “hanashiteiru”, this is often referred to as the progressive “form”, using the non-past or past tense of the verb “iru/imasu”. Having said that, if you want to refer to the kanokei or other verb forms as “tenses”, and that works for you, go right ahead.
I was reading Wikipedia and I’ll concede that hanashite and hanaseru aren’t tenses as tense is only related to time. However, it says there is debate over whether conjugations with auxiliary verbs, such as present progressive in both English and Japanese, are tenses. I’m sticking with yes.
So, in this sentence, “'re going to call” and “should call” would be tenses of the verb “to call” (the former being a variant of the tense form “are going to call”). I could live with that, but it means that English has lots of tenses, including at least three future tenses (“I will call”, “I am going to call” and “I am about to call”) with three corresponding progressive forms (“I will be calling”, “I am going to be calling” and “I am about to be calling”).
Erratum: (see bold).
NB for the purposes linguistic analysis, spelling is not a consideration, so regular nouns have only two forms. But with some irregular nouns you do get four distinctive case/number markings: child, child’s, children, children’s. “Ah, my child’s geese’s goslings, how they proliferate!” 
One thing I find interesting is how one language might be more complex inflectionally than another, but then use the same word for different meanings that have their own words in the simpler language. For example French and German both use the same word–porter and tragen respectively-- to mean “wear” and “carry”. And although I don’t normally think about it when I’m using German, it does seem odd that formal “you” (Sie) is the same word as “they”. Except for the fact that, in writing, it is capitalized when meaning “you”, it is inflected the same as “sie” and takes the same verb conjugations.
But very interesting nonetheless!
Maybe they were speaking a nonstandard dialect?
Plattdeutsch, or “Lowland German” does exhibit a merging of genders which is similar to that of Swedish and Dutch, although it has not gone as far. The system of inflection generally is much simpler than in Standard German.
– *
(This and the following quotes are excerpted and translated from German Wikipedia article here.
*
Elsewhere the article tells us that there are only two cases, nominative and accusative, the latter standing in for dative and accusative in Standard German. Aside from pronouns, there is no longer any possessive or genitive; instead one says “the X his Y”**. From the example above, it’s evident that in a great many cases there would be no marking for the accusative case, nor for grammatical distinctions between masculine and feminine. So it’s pretty clear here that both grammatical gender and case marking is on the verge of extinction.
These examples demonstrate that, for some words at least, grammatical gender has ceased to be a useful (i.e. information bearing***) component of the language. I suspect that grammatical gender and case marking in this language is not much longer for this world, and this may well provide us a glimpse of how gender was lost in English.
*Plattdeutsch comprises various dialects, not all of which have necessarily undergone simplification to this extent. In general, however, nonstandard German dialects are morphologically simpler than the standard language.
**Ths construction existed in English until the early modern era. In the music of the Renaissance, when pieces often named after and dedicated to persons that the composer wished to honor or acknowledge, one often finds titles like “The King Of Denmark His Galliard”.
*** The gender and case system may seem gratuitous, not to say aggravating, to an English speaker trying to learn German or Russian. But they must serve some communicative purpose, or they would have died out. In German there may appear to be no purpose in the fact that “duck” is feminine and “eagle” is masculine if you set out to simply write down a list of bird species; but if you want to refer to an eagle attacking a duck, grammatical gender can and does convey information. In other situations, it may appear unnecessary, although it is natural for languages to have some redundancy. In English, for example, the sole present tense inflection “-s” tells us that the subject is singular. Usually we already know this from the form of the noun, but for nonstandard nouns like “deer”, “fish”, or “horse” (in some contexts) the verb inflection is the only way in which we are told whether there is one or more than one deer, fish, etc.
ETA: From jragon’s observation that gender seemed to be still discernible in the dative, it doesn’t sound much like Plaatdeutsch.
Something along those lines that’s always baffled me is the English/French come/venir and become/devenir. In meaning, become has nothing to do with come. Be-/de- aren’t considered prefixes in this case. And the English and French words are not cognates and look nothing alike. Yet both become and devenir contain come and venir, respectively.
Something else that’s interesting but less puzzling is that the French word demander means ask but looks like demand, complete opposites. I could see how that could come about but it’s confusing nonetheless.
Become = come to be.
I should’ve known someone would come along and spoil part of the mystery. I still can’t make sense of the French word though.
I think that coould be said of the other Scandinavian languages (or dialects if you feel so inclined) as well.
When I was at school we were taught that there were four genders; masculine, feminine, real and neuter. Masculine words ended with an -e in the indefinite form and -en in the definite: pojke-n (boy, the boy), feminine words ended -a, -an: mamma-n (mum, the mum) (this would make pappa-n (daddy, the daddy) a feminine word), real gender words were all other words that ended with -n: duk-en (tablecloth) and, lastly, neuter words ended with -t: bord-et.
Since then the grammarians have lumped all -n words together to form a gender called preterium in Swedish.
There are some remains of true genders left, though, here and there in different dialects. The only example I can think of in a haste is the sun that might be referred to as she.
Norwegian, Icelandic and Faroese all have the usual Indo-European three genders.
You’re mixing some stuff up. Preterium is a tense, not a gender. The word for the gender is utrum, being a form of the Latin word uter, meaning “either” (similarly, neuter means “neither”).
Also, you can’t always determine the gender of the word solely by its form: pappa was masculine, even though it is inflected in the typically feminine way.
Å jänta å ja’, å jänta å ja’
å allt uppå landavägen, å ja’,
å jänta å ja’, å jänta å ja’
å allt uppå landavägen.
Där mötte ja´ henn´ e môra så rar,
**då sola ho sken på himmalen så klar,**
å däjli som ljusan dagen ho var -
mett hjârte, hvar tog dä vägen?
Of course, that’s hardly an example of modern Swedish.