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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 six-tense language Kalaw Lagaw Ya of Australia has the remote past, the recent past, the today past, the present, the today/near future and the remote future. Some languages, like the Amazonian Cubeo language , have a historical past tense, used for events perceived as historical.
Relative tense and absolute tense are distinct possible uses of the grammatical category of tense. Absolute tense means the grammatical expression of time reference (usually past, present or future) relative to "now" – the moment of speaking. In the case of relative tense, the time reference is construed relative to a different point in time ...
Waz "was" can indicate past tense before the future marker gon and the modal sapostu: Ai waz gon lift weits "I was gonna lift weights"; Ai waz sapostu go "I was supposed to go". There is a preverbal auxiliary yustu for past tense habitual aspect: yustu tink so ("used to think so").
Apart from the special cases referred to in the sections above, many other dependent clauses use a tense that might not logically be expected – in particular the present tense is used when the reference is to future time, and the past tense is used when the reference is to a hypothetical situation (in other words, the form with will is ...
The future perfect is used to say that something will happen in the future but before the time of the main sentence. It is called futuro anteriore and is formed by using the appropriate auxiliary verb "to be" (essere) or "to have" (avere) in the future simple tense followed by the past participle: Io avrò mangiato ("I will have eaten")
Dutch has a similar tense to the English one, formed with zou/zouden, the past tense of zullen, the auxiliary of the future tenses, e.g. ik zou je alles gezegd hebben ("I would have told you everything"). In Dutch grammar it is called the "perfect past future tense", emphasizing that it also has future-in-past properties.