A hodiernal tense (

abbreviated An abbreviation () is a shortened form of a word or phrase, by any method including shortening, contraction, initialism (which includes acronym), or crasis. An abbreviation may be a shortened form of a word, usually ended with a trailing per ...

) is a

grammatical tense In grammar, tense is a grammatical category, category that expresses time reference. Tenses are usually manifested by the use of specific forms of verbs, particularly in their grammatical conjugation, conjugation patterns. The main tenses found ...

for the current day. (''Hodie'' or ''hodierno die'' is

Latin Latin ( or ) is a classical language belonging to the Italic languages, Italic branch of the Indo-European languages. Latin was originally spoken by the Latins (Italic tribe), Latins in Latium (now known as Lazio), the lower Tiber area aroun ...

for 'today'.) Hodiernal tenses refer to events of today (in an absolute tense system) or of the day under consideration (in a relative tense system). Hodiernal

past tense The past tense is a grammatical tense whose function is to place an action or situation in the past. Examples of verbs in the past tense include the English verbs ''sang'', ''went'' and ''washed''. Most languages have a past tense, with some hav ...

refers to events of earlier today (or earlier than the reference point of the day under consideration), while hodiernal future tense refers to events of later today (or later than the reference point of the day under consideration). A post-hodiernal tense is a future tense for events that will occur after today or the day under consideration, while pre-hodiernal is a past tense for events that occurred before today or the day under consideration. Languages which include or included hodiernal tenses include Mwera and Classical French (it is suggested that in 17th-century French, the '' passé composé'' served as a hodiernal past). Mwotlap (

Vanuatu Vanuatu ( or ; ), officially the Republic of Vanuatu (; ), is an island country in Melanesia located in the South Pacific Ocean. The archipelago, which is of volcanic origin, is east of northern Australia, northeast of New Caledonia, east o ...

) has a hodiernal future, which is the only absolute tense of its TAM system. The term 'hodiernal past' was first used in publications in 1968. It should not be confused with ''diurnal'', a subtype of periodic tense encoding that an action takes place during the day, whether in the past, the present or the future.

References

Grammatical tenses {{grammar-stub