Hi David,
Pali apparently often uses the historical or narrative present for true realities (as against virtual ones). A rule of thumb is that we should not take Pali tenses and English ones on par, although they may agree at certain points, esp in stories.
Sometimes even singular and plural do not work as in English. We get cases where both sg and pl referring to the same subject, for example. In other words, Pali tends to be contextual: What is the overall drift or idea of the passage? Then we work the tense/s accordingly.
It helps to see Pali in the early Buddhist texts (EBT) as being "non-technical." "Technical" means to fix words to mean or behave in a fixed way. In English, we often use words to define things, but often it comes to the words defining the situation.
It's like the kind of camera or film we use to record a sunset, and then look at the result. Pali is like real-life ways of looking at the sunset, or it provides us with the tools for that. Pali is mostly non-technical, even the Dharma "terms" depend on the context. This means we need an experiential feel for what Pali is pointing at -- that is awakening.
Awakening is beyond language, and that is our best means of communication at the moment.
I've worked on some fascinating suttas (esp U 8.1-8.3) in SD 50a, which should be available on our Dharmafarer website:
http://dharmafarer.org.
In this sense, Pali is a living language of spiritual experiences.
With metta,
Piya