timeline clipart created by Tim Abney

Brief Introduction

Stay tuned for more information on the pluperfect tense in Latin.

Pluperfect is virtually extinct in English. We avoid it by using time cues:

After we ran in the woods, we walked home.

The use of "after" makes clear which event occurred first.

Latin sometimes makes use of time cues, but more typically expresses the time relationship by using the pluperfect tense, which is as far back in Latin as you can go.

Puerī sepulcrum vīdērunt quod Caecilia Metella aedificāverat.

The boys visited the tomb that Caecilia Metella had built.

Obviously, the boys can't see a structure that doesn't yet exist. Both the sightseeing and the construction took place in the past, but the building happened first. Latin uses pluperfect to make this sequence clear.

Horizon of Expectations

Two useful questions when reading Latin are the following:

1. What do I have?

   (Some authorities prefer to separate this into two questions, but to me it seems preferrable to crunch them into the single question above):

1. What do I see?
2. Therefore, what do I have?
2. Therefore, what do I expect?

One may apply these questions to grammatical features or to the reading contents of the passage. Example:

• If I have a murder victim on the first page, then I have a mystery.
• If I have a mystery, then I may reasonably expect a detective and an eventual solution.

Pluperfect Expectation:

If I have a pluperfect verb, I may reasonably expect that there will be another verb in a past tense, and that this other verb occurred after the action of the pluperfect verb.

See the page HorizonOfExpectations for more details.