Detail #259: Splitting the Tense System in Two Parts

Tense systems come in a few different kinds, but two common, and clearly distinct types are the following ones:

	Past	Present	Future
past vs. non-past	past	non-past
future vs. non-future	non-future		future

An apology for my lack of an aesthetic sense with regards to colour would probably be justified about now.

One possibility is to have a conlang where both of these types appear, and even in the same contexts. Split the verbs into two "natural" classes, distinguished by how the action they depict reasonably interacts with tense.

Thus, habituals are likely to be of the past/non-past typ, as are non-dynamic states. Perfectives and more 'dynamic' actions, however, might be more likely to be of the non-future/future, etc. Some verbs might, for semantic reasons, be more likely to belong to one or the other - and there may be things like the nature of the subject or the nature of the object to influence the meaning.

The same morpheme could naturally mark non-future as well as non-past (with separate morphemes for past and future), or non-past and future vs.  non-future and past.

These are just some ramblings about possible things to do with the verbs in your language.