Comparative Grammar

Tenses

English	Greek	Latin	German	French
	Hebrew		Spanish	Others

English

Reference: Wenham, p. 11.

English

	Past	Present	Future
Continuous	Imperfect (Past Continuous) I was loving / I used to love	Present Continuous I amloving	Future Continuous I shall be loving
Simple	I loved	I love	I shall love
Complete	Pluperfect I had loved	Perfect I have loved	Future Perfect I shll have loved
Continuous-Complete	Pluperfect Continuous I had been loving	Perfect Continuous I have been loving	Future Perfect I shall have been loving

Greek

Reference: Wenham, Elements of New Testament Greek (Oxford: OUP, ).
Robertson, A.T. A Grammar of The Greek New Testament in the Lihgt of Hitorical Research (Nashville: Broadman, 1934).

Greek

	Past	Present	Future
Continued	Imperfect, Aorist	Present	Future
Complete	Pluperfect	Perfect	Future Perfect

Latin

Reference: Smith, F. Kinchin. Teach Yourself Latin (London: English Universities Press, 1962).

Latin

	Past	Present	Future
Continued	Imperfect	Present	Future
Complete	Pluperfect	Perfect	Future Perfect

German (Deutsche)

Reference: Gewehr, Wolf and von Schmidt Wolff A. German Review & Readings (New York: Rinehart and Winston, 1973).

	Past	Present	Future
Point	Simple Past (Imperfekt) (Note 1)	Simple Present (Note 1)	Present Future (Futur I) p.74
Complete	Past Perfect (Plusquamperfekt)		Future Perfect (Futur II) p.75
Complete	Present Perfect (Perfekt) Past

Note 1: In contrast to English there are no emphatic or progressive forms in German. Therefore, the English forms, I go, I do go, I am going are all translated as ich gehe. (Past tenses see p.47)

Note 2: conditional and conditional Perfect have a special form, but some grammar books don't treat them as separate tenses.

French (Francaise)

Reference: Handbook of French Grammar (in Simplified Chinese)

Reference: Handbook of French Grammar (in Simplified Chinese)

	Past (temps passé)	Present	Future
Point	Simple Pastt (le passé simple)	Present (temps présent)	Simple Future (temps futur : le futur simple) p.164
Point-Continuous	Composite Past (le passé composé) the action was finished in the undefined past, but its effect can be felt upto now.
Continuous	Imperfect (l'imparfait)

Spanish (Espanol)

Spanish

Hebrew (one of Semitic)

Reference: Seow, C. L. A Grammar for Biblical Hebrew (Nashville: Abingdon, 1990).

Semitic has no means of distinguishing different tenses.

It has instead a great variety of ways of translating verbal relatives, e.g. causative, intensive, desiderative, jussive, reciprocal, reflexive.

Others

Reference: Lord, Robert Comparative Linguistics

The Arabic imperfect is by no means a tense as it can express the future as well as the present. (p.141.)

With Russian and the other Slav languages, there is more than a faint trace of correlation with tense. There is in fact a preterite (Past) form of both aspects, and in Russian, a composite future in the imperfective aspect. (p.141.)