Wapsi Square Forum

Ref: Thread for 12/19/12.

So, time travelers would need a variety of tenses beyond Standard English. For those not native speakers, here's the list of normal verb tenses in English, before we get on to the needed "expanded" list. (Thanks to the Purdue OWL for the list of current tenses)

Simple Present: They walk
Present Perfect: They have walked
Simple Past: They walked
Past Perfect: They had walked
Future: They will walk
Future Perfect: They will have walked

So, for time travel, we need a variety of tenses to describe the following situations.
Future events in a timeline that no longer exists - "They would have walked" (Bathory's Daughter suggested Past Future Impossible)
Past events in a time traveler's own timeline that didn't happen because of a change - Past Perfect Impossible?
Past events that will change/cease due to action taken in the observer's own future - Oh god, I've gone cross-eyed.
And many more...

Larry Niven calls this "Excendrin Headache Number sqrt(-1)". This is why the book I'm working on will never involve time travel, and why the Department of Temporal Investigations has no sense of humor.

I saw this on Facebook this morning, and I thought it applied.

There's more where that one came from...

If time travel does not cause events with certainty, you could have Future (or past) Implausible and Future Plausible, depending on whether the event became more or less likely.
"You perhaps will do . . ."
"It is unlikely you will go . . ."