The categories of 'tense' have a surface rationality, especially in a language like Latin, which distinguishes present (cantat 'he sings), past (cantavit 'he sang'), and future (cantabit 'he will sing'), but even here one soon finds that these categories disagree with our non-linguistic analysis: the 'historical present' is used in Latin as in English, of past events, and the meanings of the Latin tense-forms are mixed up with considerations other than relative time.
- Bloomfield (1935), a pag.272