The pluperfect (shortening of plusquamperfect), usually called past perfect in English, characterizes certain verb forms and grammatical tenses involving an action from an antecedent point in time.
The word "perfect" in this sense means "completed"; it contrasts with the "imperfect", which denotes uncompleted actions or states.
The pluperfect is needed to make it clear that the first event (the thinking and the supposed reaching) is placed even earlier in the past.
Modern Greek uses auxiliaries to form the pluperfect; examples are given in the table at the end of this article.
In many cases an ablative absolute phrase, consisting of a noun and perfect participle in the ablative case, may be used in place of a pluperfect; for example: Pecuniis mercatori datis, cessit emptor, "When money had been given (more literally: Money having been given) to the merchant, the buyer left."
The recent pluperfect is formed correspondingly to French by using the imperfect of the appropriate auxiliary verb (essere or avere) plus the past participle.
For example, Quando cheguei, soube que o meu amigo morrera, 'When I came, I found out that my friend had died'.
For example, in Când l-am întrebat, el văzuse deja filmul 'When I asked him, he had already seen the movie'.
The pluperfect is expressed by combining the auxiliary verb fost or the short version fo' (= "was" in English or "war" in German) with the participle, which (quite difficult to explain) is stated in its feminine form.
[citation needed] In Sicilian, the pluperfect is formed in the standard manner for modern Romance languages, using the verb "to have" inflected into the imperfect tense and a past participle which is invariable according to person and number.
[4] This structure has similarities to the pluperfect in Maltese, and therefore it appears likely that the Pantesco form was influenced by the Arabic dialect formerly spoken on Pantelleria.
For example, in pluperfect Había comido cuando mi madre vino 'I had eaten when my mother came', but in pretérito anterior Hube comido cuando mi madre vino 'I had eaten when my mother would come'.
Sometimes (specially in journalism) the imperfect subjunctive with '-ar' termination can be used with a pluperfect sense in subordinated phrases, but it is neither normative nor recommended.
[6] In Dutch, the pluperfect (voltooid verleden tijd) is formed similarly as in German: the past participle (voltooid deelwoord) is combined with the past-tense form of the auxiliary verb hebben or zijn, depending on the full lexical verb: Voordat ik er erg in had, was het al twaalf uur geworden.
In addition, pluperfect is sometimes used instead of present perfect: Dat had ik al gezien (voordat jij het zag) - lit.
Ukrainian and Belarusian preserve a distinct pluperfect (давньоминулий час or запрошлы час – davńomynulyj čas or zaprošły čas) that is formed by preceding the verb with buv / bula in Ukrainian and byŭ / była in Belarusian (literally, 'was').
It is used to denote a completed action in the past before another action (Pred nekaj leti so bile vode poplavile vsa nabrežja Savinje, 'A few years ago, all the banks of Savinja River had been flooded) or, with a modal verb, a past event that should have happened (Moral bi ti bil povedati, 'I should have told you').
[citation needed] Past tense of the adjectival verbs (powinienem był zrobić "I should have done") and conditional mood (zrobiłbym był "I would have done") are often wrongly considered pluperfect forms – morphologically, the latter is actually past conditional, rarely used in modern Polish.
Alternatively, it can be formed by using the imperfect ("imperfekt") of "biti" with the past participle of the main verb.
In Welsh, the pluperfect is formed without an auxiliary verb, usually by interpolating -as- before the simple past ending: parhasem, "we had remained".
"었" is a morpheme that is analogous to the suffix "ed" in English, in that it is also used to form the simple past tense.
Thus In Classical Nahuatl, the pluperfect is formed by adding -ca(h) to the end of the verb; while close to the average meaning of past perfect, it more accurately reflects an action that has been undone by the time of speaking.
Both languages allow to construct a past tense with a modal verb (like English "to have", in German "haben", in French "avoir"), for example "I have heard it".