The pluperfect, or past perfect, refers to an action completed before the present tense. It is constructed with “had” plus the past participle. It indicates completion for some time and often refers to two events, one completed before the other. Its meaning is consistent across Indo-European languages, but its construction varies. French uses avoir or etre plus participle, while ancient Greek uses reduplication and vowel change.
The pluperfect, often called the past perfect in English, is a tense that refers to an action that was completed at some point before the present tense. It is a combination of the perfect tense and the perfect tense. The construction of the pluperfect in English is “had” plus the past participle, for example, “had eat”.
The word “piluperfetto” comes from the Latin and means “more than perfect”. In grammatical terms, “perfect” means “complete,” so the pluperfect indicates that something is not only complete, but that it has been completed for some time. A pluperfect sentence often refers to two different events, one of which was completed before the other occurred. For example, “The cat had eaten three koi before the keeper chased him from the pond” contains the pluperfect “he had eaten” and the simple past “pursued”. This shows that the cat had finished eating three koi before another specified point in the past, the time when the keeper chased it away.
The pluperfect has slight variations from both the past tense and the perfect tense. The sentence “The cat ate three koi before the keeper drove it out of the pond” contains two different events, but one event – the cat eating the koi – happened before the event happened in the present – the keeper drove it away. “He Had eaten,” in this example, is present perfect tense, meaning that it reached completion before the present tense, rather than before some point in the past. On the other hand, “The cat ate three koi” is in the simple past, meaning that it doesn’t explicitly refer to when it happened in relation to any other event, only that it happened sometime in the past.
The meaning of the pluperfect is fairly consistent across Indo-European languages, though obviously its construction varies. Very often, however, the construction of the pluperfect is a combination of the perfect with the simple past. French, on the other hand, uses the avoir or etre plus participle construction as the past simple rather than the perfect, but the pluperfect is still formed with the past tense avoir or etre plus participle as in English. Koine and other ancient Greek dialects use a reduplication – an initial consonant plus “e” – to indicate completion, combined with a vowel change in the ending to indicate the past tense.
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