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Comment by denton-scratch | Hacker News Reader

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".

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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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

> 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

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.

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

"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.

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!"

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

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.

"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

"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"

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