Prophetic Perfect Tense | Hacker News Reader

Prophetic Perfect Tense

en.wikipedia.org

154 pointsdrdee96 comments

The examples are far too obscure. They don't clarify how the tense is used, nor how utterances relate to events, because the events mentioned in the examples are so obscure (I don't recognize the names of any of the protagonists, and only one of the named prophets).

And to understand the tense, you have to resort to the examples; the main body of the article doesn't mae it at all clear.

I think it might benefit from a synthetic, kitchen-sink "example".

Your kitchen-sink is vanished, evaporated in the cosmic cataclysm that devoured your house, your city and country, and was the final battle of the wars brought upon us by the singularity.

Bravo!

But that seems to me to simply be replacing "will have" with "is", for rhetorical or expressive purposes.

That’s basically what the tense is.

r/BrandNewSentence

Basically, it is speaking of the future as if it had already happened, as if it was the past. The idea being that the prophet had seen into the future and was writing about it as if it was history that had already happened in the past.

Imagine someone in the late 1800s writing "and two towers of New York City were hit by two large metal birds, one to one tower and another to the other tower, and both towers collapsed". They are writing about future events as if they had already happened.

> and two towers of New York City were hit by two large metal birds

I think that is simply the past tense (or "prophetic past" if you will). For it to be the prophetic perfect tense, it would be:

> and two towers of New York City are hit by two large metal birds

"are" instead of "were". The examples from the article are this way too. eg:

> my people are gone into captivity

How can you tell these examples aren’t simply referring to events that have passed? It doesn’t seem clear to me that these are referring to future events as if they had already passed.

The given examples are lacking context.

"I prayed this morning and received a vision. The Twin Towers have fallen, and America has gone to war in the Middle East."

had gone

Following the given example, you know it is 1800 and the Twin towers do not even exist. So context makes clear that it did not happen.

The speaker has a ceremonial robe, hat, and is declaiming with a mystical expression on their face. Substitute as culturally appropriate.

Because they are prophets, giving a prophecy, ie seeing into the future and retelling it.

It makes sense.

If you looked into the future and described what you saw, you would describe it in past tense, because the vision has already come to you.

Here's one found in common parlance in English: "We are doomed."

That is, we are presently in a state of having had judgment passed upon us in the near past.

That statement is sometimes made prior to any judgment being passed, but in certain expectation of such a judgment.

I was going to argue that's due to the definition of "doom", but actually this works with all sorts of other similar phrasing, so I find myself agreeing with you:

"We're dead"

"We're fucked"

"We're rich!"

"Doomed" in common parlance doesn't mean judgment has been passed; it just means that our unhappy future has become certain. "Damned" does mean that judgement has been passed - is that what you meant?

Common parlance is wrong a lot of times. Doomed means exactly that judgement has been passed, which means that something has become certain to happen. By God, by providence or by the laws of nature, whatever you wish to call it.

Yes but that doesn't mean it's necessarily prophetic perfect tense. It might be the case that the doom-ing occurred yesterday, and today we are just awaiting the doom that will arrive tomorrow.

more commonly rendered as "we're fucked" or, when the interlocutor is lucky, "you're fucked".

my attempts at modern examples, assuming I understand this...

Ah, you've already failed the diet, for I see a donut in your future!

The cat has knocked over the vase, even though it sits there innocently. Just you wait, its paw is twitching!

You've already laughed at my joke, you just don't know it yet. Get ready to chuckle.

The socks are lost, the moment you buy them.

EDIT: hmmm it seems a lot more profound in the Biblical examples

"Ten years from now, OpenAI has become a trillion-dollar company: LLMs ate all other software." seems like it would be a modern sort of prophesy in this mode. It's a "I can see it; I'm having a vision of what will-have-had-happened, I'm just narrating it for you" sort of thing.

I recommend Dr. Dan Streetmentioner's Time Traveler's Handbook of 1001 Tense Formations[0] for even more advanced tenses, such as future semiconditionally modified subinverted plagal past subjunctive intentional.

[0] https://qntm.org/streetmentioner

Yeah, yours sound less prophetic because you don't speak as if it is obviously going to happen. You add things like "for I see it in your future", "even though [it hasn't happened yet]", "just you wait", "you just don't know it yet", "get ready"

I think it should be “you are already failed”.

It seems to work better on verbs that have a different form for “I failed” and “I have failed” which “fail” does not.

Try “you are already fallen at the first hurdle”.

I think these are not examples; each of your examples is of a failure that (implicitly) has already occurred, but the protagonist hasn't realised it yet.

"The article was read, and lo, the examples clarified nothing! Names of protagonists were unknown, prophets recognized by only one. The main body of the text illuminated not the tense's usage. A synthetic, kitchen-sink example was sorely missed and yet never appeared."

> I think it might benefit from a synthetic, kitchen-sink "example".

How about this: "Omae Wa Mou Shindeiru"

Nani????

https://youtu.be/c91yi2XLAMA

Exactly what I going to post.

"in the grim dark future there is only war"

"I've already lost my #AirPods and they haven't even come out yet. #AppleKeynote" @kandeejohnson Sep 7, 2016

https://twitter.com/kandeejohnson/status/773607095124058112

FWIW I lost zero airpods so far, but they all got terrible batteries and busted speaker elements.

If I ‘flex my ear’ (the tensor tympani [0]) I can make the noise cancellation produce a mic feedback ringing sound.

[0] https://www.sciencealert.com/some-people-can-make-a-roaring-...

Yeah, I have a permanent hole in my eardrum and it absolutely ruins the noise cancellation.

This attitude seems at home in tech, and perhaps the grammatical form would save us time writing the word "inevitably".

Self-assured certainty about the future is everywhere in our business, whether it's disciples of the smartphone-gulag telling us that "modern life is now impossible without one", or prophets announcing the death of cash, and many other opinions on digital technology about which it "is already too late".

Those are dangerous quasi-religious ideas in my reckoning, and not at all befitting rational scientists and engineers.

Perseverate rigidity (the inability to see alternate futures or believe in choice) arises for many reasons; trauma, intolerance of uncertainty about the future, or low neuro-plasticity, or as a self-reinforcing belief in cults and echo-chambers.

It is as if we live in the future we think we want, and by acting as if it has already happened, usher it into being.

But I think this is strangely parochial. Only 70 years ago fears over the proliferation of nuclear technology into the civic or even domestic/personal spheres (think radium watch dials and nuclear batteries) were addressed by forming the International Atomic Energy Agency [0]. Since then it's successfully tracked knowledge hazards and exports, created safeguards, and generally stewarded nuclear development in the world.

Perhaps we'll see a similar set up for AI, or even for all digital technologies, if we can't move beyond our belief in "irresistible forces" and "inevitability".

I think the true spirit of science and innovation is not just to see what is possible, but to remember that everything else is too.

[0] https://www.iaea.org/

That is a good and refreshing example. Some people were scared to death by nuclear war. Then suddenly it was decided that everybody just forget about that fear, even though nothing has changed regarding the numbers of nuclear arms and the risk of them being used. But in the end that fear served nobody and nuclear war has been avoided.

I think nuclear fear continues to be a very handy card for the rulers to pull out of their sleeves whenever they have a need to quickly throw the populace into fear and desperation.

I've never been bitten by a rattle snake. Does that mean me wearing boots and stepping carefully on hikes has been pointless?

How do you know that the fear served no one? Is it possible the anti-nuke movement changed the way we consider the risks and rationale of nuclear deterrence? How come we never hear about acid rain or the ozone layer anymore. Are the movements examples of mass hysterics or of people pushing progress?

Did you know that world nuclear stockpiles have shrunk dramatically in recent decades from ~70,000 warheads in 1986 to ~12,000 today? Would it affect your risk calculation if stockpiles had grown or spread? If they are as safe as you claim, should numbers, actors, and locations even matter? Have you considered the effects of a loss of vigilance might have?

I have no idea why your blood seams to be boiling from my comment.

> Did you know that world nuclear stockpiles have shrunk dramatically in recent decades from ~70,000 warheads in 1986 to ~12,000 today?

No, and neither do you. The quality and quantity of nuclear arms is something that only people involved in military intelligence knows. I expect that arms continually become more and more lethal, whether the military communicates that or not.

> Would it affect your risk calculation if stockpiles had grown or spread?

What risk calculation? There's nothing I can do about the threat level of nuclear arms.

> If they are as safe as you claim, should numbers, actors, and locations even matter?

What is as safe as I claim? Nuclear arms?

This is a simple misunderstanding of Hebrew "Perfect Tense" and "Imperfect Tense", which is NOT directly related to either future or past:

https://www.blueletterbible.org/resources/grammars/hebrew/si...

What about the greek scriptures with the prophecy in Rev 21:4 for example: "for the former things are passed away."

The idea of prophecy is kind of curious when you think about it. These days if you said you had a vision of the future that you literally saw and were so sure about, people would tell you you were dreaming, and if you kept insisting, delusional.

Plenty of fiction uses "future seeing" as an interesting plot device, (Dune for instance, and currently the Foundation tv series), so we clearly find the concept intriguing, but it is relegated to fiction of course, so likely we generally find it preposterous, and perhaps it's all just biblical references after all.

But it seems that there was a time that people could get away with prophecy as a real claim. It's hard to put your mind sometimes into a pre-scientific mindset, but obviously enough people found these claims compelling. (I realize there is some survivorship bias going on here.). How did they get away with it, I wonder? Just make it vague enough and far enough into the future to be unverifiable? Just make it scary enough that people don't want to take the risk that you are wrong?

When you think about it, it's amazing that some of these stories made it so far and that people even today still believe them. I mean this from a kind of anthropological point of view I guess. Makes you wonder what we commonly believe today that will seem silly 1000 years from now.

In German there is one tense that is more or less equivalent called Futur II or Futur exakt (also called Vorzukunft which literally translates to Prefuture). It is used to describe events which will be past in the future.

This is Future Perfect in English, hence the name Prophetic Perfect Tense, I guess.

It is also not that similar, since PPT is speaking about events in the future in past tense as if they have already happened and Future Perfect/Futur II uses "will": "I will have finished my homework by tomorrow."

That's a good point, there is no will there, didn't even think about it.

I assumed from the title that it was the same as FP.

But you seemto contradict yourself; you say that PPT is FP, and then say that "it is not that similar"; they can't be the same thing, and yet dissimilar.

The GP is ambiguous but I presume that they meant the Futur II in German is the same as future perfect tense in English, and neither is the same as the prophetic perfect tense.

OIC, maybe that makes sense. But I can't really tell, because the WP article didn't enlighten me.

And verily, she said that the bike shed shall have been painted blue, and there were sparodic lamentations, and forsooth he said, "well actually, blue is for bus sheds".

I've seen many chess commentator videos where they talk about possible future moves as if they have sometimes happened in other games even uf they are out of opening theory, and definitely well into a unique game. "Here, you will have sometimes a6, or even b3". What is this called? Potential Future Tense?

Tenses are not distinguished by their semantics, but by their grammatical form. That is, the same tense (in this case, future simple) can be used with different semantics in different contexts.

You could argue that the "sometimes" has actually become codified into a part of the tense (so the verb phrase is not "will have" but "will have sometimes") and then it could be considered a new tense. But someone would have to analyze this language use quite carefully to see whether it has become codified in this way, or if it's just about using the regular future simple tense in a slightly different sense or in a somewhat formulaic manner.

> Tenses are not distinguished by their semantics, but by their grammatical form.

Annoyingly, people don’t always keep these two definitions as separate as they should be. This means there are language-specific grammatical structures called ‘past’/‘present’/‘future’, and also idealised temporal semantics called ‘past’/‘present’/‘future’. This is why you get things like the so-called ‘English future tense’, which is used sometimes as a future tense but just as often for modal certainty.

(The situation is even worse when it comes to aspect. It took me a very long time to understand what ‘perfective’ meant, because the ‘perfective’ category in different languages means different things!)

Another example of this is the "historical present": https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_present

I'd say grammatically it's simple future: will + verb.

Future perfect

https://www.cliffsnotes.com/study-guides/french/french-ii/fr...

I'm just reading it as an omission of the degree of possibility when making a prediction. We do this all the time in all sorts of contexts, e.g. "we'll not finish the project if we spend time on this feature".

I think you are referring to the future perfect tense.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Future_perfect

Future perfect would be "you will have had ...". This is future simple.

Subjunctive tense, the wishful or imagined future.

The subjunctive is a mood, which is independent of tense.

Had I gone [...]

Were I working instead of commenting on HN [...]

I should be glad if you would [...]

Maybe a good thread to ask:

Does anyone know the term for the tense of speech that I've noticed popping up more and more frequently over the last decade or so? I first noticed it in sports but now it's everywhere.

It's something like stating a what-if as a present fact. Like, instead of saying "If he caught the pass, he could run it in for a touchdown," people say "he gets that pass and he goes all the way in for a touchdown."

I'm actually even struggling to come up with more examples because it's become so commonplace now.

Does anyone know what I'm talking about?

I think it's been around a long time. Maybe you notice it in sports commentary not because it's coming into style, but because it has gone out of style?

Another factor might be that it fits in with how the present tense used to narrate replays. "Jones fakes the post route, gets separation, and the pass goes right over his finger tips. He catches that ball, he's gone!"

Yeah maybe it has been around for a lot longer.

I always wonder if whatever specific speech pattern is really increasing more or I'm just noticing it more and being aware of it.

I think it's probably both-- it's definitely a lot easier to tell with newer slang, etc.

I think using the present tense in sports commentary helps increase the sense of action and immersion for viewers and listeners. It certainly does for me.

In modern casual English it's very common to use present indicative in scenarios you would traditionally use other tenses (perfect or future) or moods (conditional or subjunctive).

Yeah I think this may be it.

"Present indicative instead of conditional" is maybe what I'm talking about?

Kinda like, the speaker is dropping the word "if" from the statement?

Imagine a political commentator saying something like "Trump wins the election, xyz happens, we're in new territory"

Where the "correct" expression is "IF Trump wins the election then xyz could happen and we would be in new territory"

(Not trying to make any sort of political point here, just as an example of what you might hear from a talking head on TV)

That construction is simply dropping an implied "if". It's a rhetorical trick, bordering on dishonest - it's trying to paint a false picture and make something sound weightier or more exciting than it is, by making you think about a hypothetical as if it actually happened when it didn't.

to those who couldn't think of an example, You snooze you lose

As a formal framework, probability theory relies on a series of axioms to hold (e.g. a measurable space of events), which enables a closure provided with interesting mathematical properties, but which is not necessarily representative of the way in which humans mentally form or process events. Given any description of the world we may always find a description which differs in some aspect from the previous one, adding any detail. As a modeling framework, the limitations of standard theory of probability to capture human reasoning is proven by the existence of several cognitive patterns (often named biases or fallacies) which do not follow what is predicted by the formal theory. The core limitation motivating the present contribution lies however in the mismatch between what humans see as informative and the definition of information given by Shannon, that triggered in the 90’s the introduction of Simplicity Theory (ST) . The present paper introduces a novel hypothesis concerning the theoretical bases which makes this cognitive model functional.

Unexpectedness and Bayes’ Rule – Giovanni Sileno and Jean-Louis Dessalles

https://cifma.github.io/Papers-2021/CIFMA_2021_paper_13.pdf

> As a modeling framework, the limitations of standard theory of probability to capture human reasoning is proven by the existence of several cognitive patterns (often named biases or fallacies) which do not follow what is predicted by the formal theory.

I don't think probability theory (or more generally logic) tries to model human reasoning. To the contrary, it is a tool to make reasoning better by introducing rigour, and thus overcoming biases.

NATO – APPROVED FOR PUBLIC RELEASE

Recent COIN and CT operations around the world have brought to light an increased need for influence capabilities on local populations and key individuals. The understanding of the human terrain and its dynamics is the key for answering those new operational needs and obviously calls for a modeling and simulation effort. Our goal is to develop a simulation of the dynamics of the population in terms of attitude and behavior change and to use in training and decision aid applications. Building on a first generation model, the Hearts & Minds Impact Tool, available from a previous project, the current research work aims at a complete overhaul of the cognitive aspect of the model. This new model find its scientific foundations in Social and cognitive psychology and more specifically in Fazio’s model of attitude and Dessalles’ Simplicity Theory. By difference with most the existing models dealing with opinion dynamics, our model will specifically address the problem of attitude construction and adaptation toward Forces. Attitudes of individuals within the population will evolve based on the perceptions that have individuals on their actions, inter-personal factual communication and populations' social preferences. The first results of the simulation will be provided along with the description of the model.

https://perso.limsi.fr/sabouret/ps/MP-SAS-105-BROUSMICHE.pdf

I'm reminded of Gandalf's magic in The Lord of the Rings. He causes things with declarative statements: "Your staff is broken". "You shall not pass".

In Middle-earth it comes down to a timeline that has already happened and is now being replayed, of which a few inhabitants are granted special insight. It acts like magic, but it's not clear what direction (if any) causality runs.

If I understand LoTR correctly (including the Silmarillion), there is a God figure (Iluvatar) that has at least ordained. It's a replay or not, depending on how you interpret whether the Valars' song was events happening, or just made events happen. But in either view, Iluvatar is still controlling it all, because he controlled how the song went, even though Melkor tried to mess it up.

The Internet of your youth is gone; she shall be browsed no more; the mighty Page has fallen; him too ChatGPT enshat.

Eh, I don't call it a separate tense if it's the same exact grammar. Like, you can say future events in the present tense in English, maybe when designing a plan ("I go left, then I go straight 10 miles"). Doesn't mean it's some fancy "prophetic present tense."

You should start a Wikipedia page for misidentified tense.

Or respond to this similar complaint on this article's Talk from 2007:

> The article describes prophetic perfect tense as "a literary technique", yet categorizes it as a grammatical tense. It seems to me that the categorization does not apply as there is not indication that "prophetic perfect" exists as a discrete tense; rather, it's a particular application of tenses described elsewhere. Any objection to removing the categorization as grammatical tense? -- Shunpiker 15:53, 16 March 2007 (UTC)

When Romans wrote letters, they often used the imperfect past to refer to the present, as if the writer is putting himself into the future when the letter is being read, not when it is being written. It is merely a conventional use of the imperfect in Latin, but I'm sure someone has, at some point, given this tendency a label like "epistolary present".

This article mentioned the prophetic perfect is something described by Hebrew grammarians, but doesn't mention if there is any special language feature of Hebrew. Is there some special morphology associated with prophetic perfect, or is this just a label for the use of the perfect, much like "epistolary present"?

A tense+mood I love is in Spanish, and it's the opposite of prophetic perfect: the future perfect (of subjunctive mood).

It's meant for hypothetical situations finished at some point in the past from the time referenced (but in the future from now). It's normally relegated to legal texts nowadays, but can be seen in contemporary literature every now and then.

"that who will have committed... will be punished..." would be an equivalent-ish construction in English.

http://verbflex.com/articles/spanish/spanish-future-perfect-...

> Since they saw in prophetic vision that which was to occur in the future, they spoke about it in the past tense and testified firmly that it had happened, to teach the certainty of his [God's] words -- may he be blessed

What does it mean for god to be blessed? Isn't god the source of all blessings?

To bless means something a little bit like to give a gift, but this gift is often very intangible. My project manager can "bless" my proposal for a new feature, for example, and that means declaring his approval, commitment, or support for it. So it is something that can be given to God, similar to honor, praise, or worship.

The Hebrew stem "shabah" means "praise", so the more correct translation would be "Praise be". Blessing seems to be a later Christian concept. The old Jewish G-d wasn't much into blessings, more into mass murder:)

It helps to think of older terms and how they relate to more-common modern terms.

"Benediction" is a synonym for one sense of "blessing" — the sense that means "to speak good upon" (bene- and -dict).

Conversely, a synonym for one sense of "curse" is "malediction", which is the opposite of "benediction": "to speak bad/evil upon" (mal- and -dict).

The Book of Mormon may also have examples of prophetic perfect tense:

https://evidencecentral.org/recency/evidence/prophetic-perfe...

”…the Analytical Engine weaves algebraical patterns just as the Jacquard loom weaves flowers and leaves.“ Ada Lovelace

Edit: this quote is written numerous years ahead of any sort of implementation of Babbage’s Analytical Engine.

Therefore the garbage can was not put by the curb last night, because they have no knowledge: and the family is watching tv and no one ones to get up and check, and the kitchen rubbish has no place to go.

It's like saying "That's already done" when undertaking to do a task, as a sort of guarantee, asking for the thing to be considered done, similar to "consider it done".

Why is there no actual "Hebrew" text in the article? :/

Not much to be gained by adding that, as verbs in biblical Hebrew have either past or future tense (past in these cases).

In this context, the term is "invented" to explain why past tense is used to describe events that haven't happened yet. This is more about Bible studies than it is about the actual Bible, so quoting the actual Bible won't add much.

Is this the first Wikipedia article you've ever seen that isn't as good as it could be? Real people, most non-experts, write these pages. Not all of them are well-written or feature complete.

Why the scare quotes? There's no actual Hebrew text in that article.

I misued the quotes, sorry. I wanted to emphasise since Hebrew is mentioned in the short description of the page.

There are only 3 tenses in hebrew - past, present, future

There is no even simple way to say “i am” in presence tense.

looks like the bible invented kubernetes/declarative definition before it was a thing

Non did it better: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ff-sx0SEO5Q&list=PL1a38XXThq...

It’s a tense that speaks of the future as if it’s already happened. The only time you’d do this is when God Himself guarantees the results. He’s the source of all truth who keeps every promise. All He declares will come to pass.

Hebrews 6:13-20 explains the certainty tied to God’s character:

https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Heb.+6%3A13-20&...

Here’s some examples of it in use in the New Testament:

Ephesians 2

https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Ephesians+2&ver...

Especially: “ But God, being rich in mercy, for his great love with which he loved us, 5 even when we were dead through our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ—by grace you have been saved— 6 and raised us up with him, and made us to sit with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus,”

In Romans 8…

https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Romans+8&versio...

…we see it in v29-30: “For whom he foreknew, he also predestined to be conformed to the image of his Son, that he might be the firstborn among many brothers. 30 Whom he predestined, those he also called. Whom he called, those he also justified. Whom he justified, those he also glorified.”

In Colossians 3:1: “ If then you were raised together with Christ, seek the things that are above, where Christ is, seated on the right hand of God.”

In Hebrews 12, which has been future tense with exhortation for the audience, we see it talk about future promises like they’ve happened:

“But you have come to Mount Zion, and to the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem, and to innumerable multitudes of angels, to the festal gathering and assembly of the firstborn who are enrolled in heaven, to God the Judge of all, to the spirits of just men made perfect, to Jesus, the mediator of a new covenant, and to the blood of sprinkling that speaks better than that of Abel.“

That’s all for that. Whereas, anyone interested in Biblical prophecy proving Jesus is the Christ might enjoy my article that builds a profile out of messianic prophecies and uses the covenant promises:

https://www.heswithjesus.com/messianicprophecy.html

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