Future Perfect

Been steadily at my Polish. From verbs of motion—determinate and indeterminate—we move once more to tense and aspect: the future tense of perfective verbs. Perfective verbs, you will recall, denote completed action, so that had you actually recalled what perfective verbs denote, we would use a perfective verb, in this case, probably zapamiętać, the perfective form of pamiętać, “to remember.” If you were trying, struggling to remember, we would use pamiętać. Good for you, though! Success! “You recalled” or “you have recalled” would be rendered zapamiętałeś or zapamiętałaś, depending on your gender because, as you recall, Polish verbs agree in number and gender in the past and future tense, but not in the present tense. If you are in the present tense process of remembering, it would simply be pamiętasz. “you remember” or “you are remembering,” regardless of guyness, girlness, or neutrality.

The future tense for perfective verbs gets a little tricky because it looks very much like the present tense form of imperfective verbs. You see, perfective verbs have no present tense. One can have perfected something in the past tense, and one can project into the future—and thus into the future tense—the completion of an action, “I will remember.” (In English, the perfective form shall has fallen somewhat into disuse. We now use expletives and emphases to communicate the certainty of future completion, “I will remember, dammit!”) But, leaving the quantum physics and metaphysics aside, one cannot complete and be in the process of completing an action at the same instant—at least grammatically. Therefore, no present tense for perfective verbs. For the future perfective in Polish, we use, for example, zapamiętam. The problem, of course, to a second language learner is that unless one already knows that the verb is perfective (and we usually don’t, at first anyway), one reads it as a present tense form, not future. It looks like a verb having something vaguely to do with remembering in the present tense, not the perfective “I will remember and complete the remembering at some specific point in the future.” From the standpoint of economizing on conjugational forms, it makes a certain amount of sense to use present tense seeming forms for verbs that cannot have a present tense, but it’s a little confusing. Little, if anything, in Polish is simple and transparent, as if the language were not so much encoded as encrypted.

I sent in my application for passport renewal today. Past perfective.