Piotr says:
> To begin with, PIE has three verb aspects. Let us call them
"durative", "aorist" and "perfect".
Thank you, Piotr. I remember old Dr. Haefner attempting to pound Greek
into my thick skull, and somehow, recall him describing the Greek
aorist (first and second) as 'tenses'. Maybe he did. You say it is an
aspect. The online dictionaries are circumspect in their definitions
of 'aorist'.
(Sticking my neck out) A tense describes a verb form which is
*morphologically* marked for grammatical 'time'. English has only two
such tenses, the present and preterit (why do you tack on an E
'preterit'). In the more popular sense (and the one just about every
last English-speaking schoolboy gets taught) 'tense' describes the
verb with its auxiliaries; 'will+infinitive', is thus the 'simple
future'.
There are *huge* arguments on the 'net language forums about the exact
definition of 'tense'. I've defined mine, as well as the usual other.
I've hung around linguistic groups long enough to learn that the
nomenclature is anything but settled, and one Ph.D. candidate to the
next invents his own, or modifies the current fashionable buzzwords to
his own purposes. Babel!