ork applied; and though some of them
are not so strictly appropriate as scientific names ought to be, it is
thought inexpedient to change them. In many old grammars, and even in the
early editions of Murray, the three past tenses are called the
_Preterimperfect, Preterperfect_, and _Preterpluperfect_. From these names,
the term _Preter_, (which is from the Latin preposition _praeter_, meaning
_beside, beyond_, or _past_,) has been well dropped for the sake of
brevity.[233]

OBS. 2.--The distinctive epithet _Imperfect_, or _Preterimperfect_, appears
to have been much less accurately employed by the explainers of our
language, than it was by the Latin grammarians from whom it was borrowed.
That tense which passes in our schools for the _Imperfect_, (as, I _slept,
did sleep_, or _was sleeping_,) is in fact, so far as the indicative mood
is concerned, _more completely past_, than that which we call the
_Perfect_. Murray indeed has attempted to show that the name is right; and,
for the sake of consistency, one could wish he had succeeded. But every
scholar must observe, that the simple preterit, which is the first form of
this tense, and is never found in any other, as often as the sentence is
declarative, tells what _happened_ within some period of time _fully past_,
as _last week, last year_; whereas the perfect tense is used to express
what _has happened_ within some period of time _not yet fully past_, as
_this week, this year_. As to the completeness of the action, there is no
difference; for what _has been done_ to-day, is as _completely done_, as
what _was achieved_ a year ago. Hence it is obvious that the term
_Imperfect_ has no other applicability to the English tense so called, than
what it may have derived from the participle in _ing_, which we use in
translating the Latin imperfect tense: as, _Dormiebam, I was sleeping;
Legebam, I was reading; Docebam, I was teaching_. And if for this reason
the whole English tense, with all its variety of forms in the different
moods, "may, with propriety, be denominated _imperfect_;" surely, the
participle itself should be so denominated _a fortiori_: for it always
conveys this same idea, of "_action not finished_," be the tense of its
accompanying auxiliary what it may.

OBS. 3.--The tenses do not all express time with equal precision; nor can
the whole number in any language supersede the necessity of adverbs of
time, much less of dates, and of nouns that express periods of d