I have been thinking about time. Also I have been thinking about grammar.

In German the present perfect is the primary form for expressing past events. “Ich habe ihn geschlagt,” for instance, which when translated directly means, “I have hit him.” Have is in the present tense, hit is being used as a past participle of to hit (I love uninflected languages): thus the present perfect. But a correct translation is probably more like “I hit him,” which is the simple past tense. The simple past (in English) implies an action that was committed at one point in the past: “I killed him on Tuesday.” The present perfect, on the other hand, implies completion but not specificity. “I have killed him,” or, “I have gone to Mexico.”

Basic grammar, and not very interesting until you consider that these constructions are not constant between languages. I already mentioned that “Ich habe ihn geschlagt” is more like “I hit him” than “I have hit him.” English derives a lot of structure from German, and that’s probably why there are times when the two tenses can be interchanged: “I sold the house” is not much different from “I have sold the house.” In Portuguese, on the other hand, the present perfect is almost never used, and the Preterito Perfeito (equivalent to the simple past) is used to express both the specific and the general past.

I have also been considering that the difference (in English at least) between present perfect and past is a subtle and useful one, and in many ways equivalent to the difference between action itself and the memory of action: memories can be had and actions cannot. Thus the present perfect is a more conceptual construction because it is aware of the present, the past, and the self that possesses knowledge of the past. The simple past, on the other hand, is less abstracted, more immersive, and more like the present progressive (I am eating) than the simple present (I eat garlic), a tense that requires a certain detachment from time to assess whether a particular action is habitual.

It’s almost dogma that the structure of language reflects the ways in which its speakers think, with the example of the Inuits and all their words for snow being used to argue that Inuits spend a lot of time thinking about snow. Of course, this example addresses nouns and denotives rather than grammar, but if the point is applicable then it suggests that there are certain subtle differences in the ways Germanic and Romance speakers conceive of time, action, and thought.

I have noticed that I when I lie I tend to use the present perfect.

I recently read an article by the editor (former, perhaps?) of the Atlantic Monthly on the disuse of tense in contemporary poetry. He argues that the various shades of meaning given by different past tense constructions (I went, was going, have gone, have been gone, have been going, had gone, had been gone, had been going) are how we deal with thinking about the past (of course), and that abandoning all these tenses for the restrictions of the present tense (I go, am going) is essentially to ignore the past.

It’s interesting to think about trying to invent a new tense. If time travel ever became possible I think it would be necessary. I can’t think of anything else we might need such a thing for, and neither has anyone else in the thousands of years of language (that we know of).