Time traveler's grammar

Douglas Adams wrote in the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy that the biggest problem with time travel was the grammar. He was right.

However, the solution presented in that superb book is obviously a joke as it takes the matter to its utmost complication. In reality, more straightforward —or, more correctly, loopforward— less awkward and grammatically sensible solutions exist, albeit not as funny and a bit too academically dry…

So. There are two grammatically paradoxical scenarios:

• The traveller will do an action in the past.
• The traveller has done an action in the future.

These two sentence show that the whole time travel grammar business is not really that much of a problem. After all, when letters are written the tenses used refer to those of the writer and not of the future reader, e.g. "by the time you will read this, I will have fled to Antarctica to join a nunnery" and not "as you read this now, I have already fled to Antarctica". Grumble grumble.

In essence, adding in the past or in the future, which act as temporal delimitators actually make the sentence sound. Curiously, the words past, present and future are actually fossils of Latin participles, namely past is from passatus, the past participle of passare (to pass), present is from præsens, the present participle of præesse (to preside), while future is from futurus, the future participle of esse (to be). This means that the two time-travel examples do have a slight (hidden) verbal muddle —and verbal muddle is what I want.

But can the muddledom be increased without breaking regular grammatical structure?

Germanic languages ‚a family which includes English, have no dedicated future tense. To wit, a word ending to make the tense (cf. "I will receive" with "je recevrai"). This gives us "the traveller will did/had done an action" or simply "the traveller will done an action", which possess the time travelling awkwardness I am after all.

Although it is a bit of silly as the construct formed by a modal verb plus past participle, simple past or past perfect is wrong. This is unavoidable as will plus present perfect is a future perfect ("the traveller will have done an action").

A further loophole is with would. Will is a modal verb that has a present indicative form (will) and a præterite (=past) subjunctive (would) and in Old English willan was a bog-standard verb (meaning to will/intend). Therefore, "the traveller would/willed do an action" should fit the bill of an action to be done in the past, but it just sounds like a conditional clause.

An alternative would be to introduce a present perfect of will: "the travelled has would/willed do/done/doing an action", which is relatively nicer.

After all that work, there is the problem that the two forms could work either way round.

• the traveller will had done an action
• the travelled has would do an action

Okay, the will verb was a good jail-breaker, what happens if it was not used and the time travelling grammar was to be tried on a Romance language?

In that case participles might do the trick, albeit badly. There are three issues, though, that make it a mess.

Firstly, the present participle (e.g. "the eating dog") is active and progressive while the past (e.g. "the eaten dog") is passive and perfect, but the inverse constructs could be made ("the has-eaten dog" and "the being eaten dog"). Parenthetically, Greek grammar has a much better fix, but Greek grammar has little to do with English, so it will have to do.

Secondly, Latin (and Greek) had a future participle but French and English do not, so it needs to be introduced. The Latin (first conjugation) suffix for the future participle is -aturus, which could be anglicised to -ature (/-eɪtʃər/ like nature) —okay, the -at- part is the same as -ed, but that is hair-splitting. So "the dog that will have eaten" could be "eatature (or eatenure) dog".

Lastly, decoupling tense of the participle from the verb and coupling the verb-y bit with the time-frame of the traveller and the participle with the time-frame of the action would allow:

• The traveller will (had) done an anction (action done in the past that the traveller will do).
• The traveller had doature an action (action doature that has not yet occurred that the traveller has done)

The latter is hideously horrible and doature sounds like douche. Which I think means that time travelling is for douchebags as is writing drivel about its grammar. I am a double douchebag and will stop here.