preterite BrE technical
preterit AmE technical

The first preterite can be compared with the simple past in English.

The perfect is used in many cases where English would have a simple preterite.

Our species, all of humanity, has become the preterite, the passed over.

The first preterite is used to express observed, recent actions.

It can be thought of the perfect form of the Preterite.

Here the preterite is used because it is an event.

The preterite is used for actions that are seen by the speaker as having occurred at a single point in time.

This is somewhat similar to the English usage of the preterite and the present perfect.

Instead, the pluperfect, like the preterite, is expressed using the perfect.

The second preterite is used for actions which lie more distantly in the past.

In the colloquial language, the perfect is often preferred to the preterite.

The preterite expresses past actions as being past, complete and done with.

They are formed using the finite verb in its preterite (simple past) form.

The simple past is also called the preterite.

"Try her out on a preterite or a pluperfect of 40, 50 years ago and everything flowed like syrup."

Yiddish has gone even farther and has no preterite at all.

A new weak preterite is formed with a dental suffix.

Spanish has two fundamental past tenses: the preterite and the imperfect.

The preterite and the perfect are distinguished in a similar way as the equivalent English tenses.

In Germanic languages, the term "preterite" is sometimes used for the past tense.

For the most part, the personal endings of the strong preterite are used for the present tense.

In various grammars, this is called the preterite, the perfect, or sometimes the aorist.

The second preterite is a past tense with an evidentiality distinction.

Some verbs (including most G-verbs) have a completely different stem in the preterite.

In the preterite, however, the paradigms fell together.

This tense is often replaced by either the preterit or the pluperfect, with the same meaning.

Third personal plurals are also marked by the addition of -s in the preterit system.

Replacement of the 2nd person singular preterit ending -t with -i.

Monosyllabic preterit verb forms such as dio and fue were usually written with accent marks before the 1950s.

This tense may also be equivalent to the simple preterit for some fixed expressions, such as Tenho dito/concluído)

The endings of the preterit and the present perfect are basically the enclitic present forms of the verb 'to be' (*ah-, here called base one).

Indicative preterit perfect - temos falado ("we have spoken" as in "we have spoken quite a lot lately" - there is an iterative notion.

Subjunctive preterit perfect - desde que tenhamos/hajamos falado ("provided that we have spoken")

The categories distinguished are Present, Preterit, Perfect, Imperfect, Future, Pluperfect, two different Subjunctives, present and past Continuative and Imperative.

As in most romance languages, the simple future of the indicative and the conditional are formed by appending the present and the preterit imperfect of the verb haver to the infinitive, respectively.

The "basic" stem is used for the preterit active verb form while the "stative" stem is used for the resultative stative verb-forms and deverbal nouns.

The preterit, typically ending in -epa or -pa, puts an emphasis on the fact that the event took place in the past, as opposed to in the present or in contrast with expectation.

Note that since the preterit by nature refers to an event seen as having a beginning and an end, and not as a context, the use of the continuous form of the verb only adds a feeling for the length of time spent on the action.

The difference between preterit and imperfect is similar to the distinctiion between the preterit in Spanish habló "he spoke (punctual)" and the imperfect hablaba "he spoke/He used to speak/he was speaking (non-punctual)".

Several languages (for example, Italian, Portuguese and Spanish) have also imperfect and pluperfect subjunctives, although it is not unusual to have just one subjunctive equivalent for preterit and imperfect (e.g. no unique subjunctive equivalent in Italian of the so-called "passato remoto").