Technical note on tense, aspect, and mood

"Tense" is not really the best term to describe the sorts of concepts that Hausa verbs convey. The term tense comes from Latin tempus 'time', and in Western European languages, distinctions having to do with time are the main distinctions that verbal differences mark. In Hausa, and most other African languages (as well as many other languages throughout the world), marking the time of an event is not a primary function of the verbal system--context or words such as time adverbs ('now', 'earlier', 'tomorrow', etc.) are the means to locate events in time.

A more appropriate term for most of the distinctions that Hausa verbs convey would be "aspect". This term comes from Slavic linguistics, where verb marking focuses on whether events are viewed as being complete--not in a state of flux--or incomplete--in progress or otherwise conveying a sense of change. The most fundamental distinctions that Hausa verbs mark are of this type. The traditional terms for these concepts are perfective and imperfective respectively. Over the years, I have preferred these terms over other terms for Hausa because they have a solid precedent in Slavic and general linguistics, and being a believer in linguistic universals, I prefer to adopt terms that have already been applied to particular distinctions rather than to invent new terminology for each language, somehow giving the impression that that language has special properties not shared across languages.

Nonetheless, after years and years of trying to force these terms down the throats of non-linguist Hausa students, for whom the terms were meaningless and opaque, I have decided to let linguistic accuracy give way to common sense and practicality for the non-linguist student of Hausa. I therefore use the following terms:

• Completive = Perfective (Note that calling this "Past" tense is absolutely wrong! There are past events that Hausa does not mark by Completive and there are Completive events that are not past.)
• Continuative = Imperfective (Note that calling this "Present" tense is absolutely wrong! There are present events that Hausa does not mark with the Continuative and Continuative events that are not present.)
• Future (not quite like European language future, but close enough!)
• Subjunctive (I find this to be a pretty good term, based on the Latin etymology meaning joined under, since nearly uses of the Subjunctive are dependent on some preceding verbal or verb-like construction.)
• "Indefinite" future = "Second" future ("Indefinite" to refer to this form is not a great term, but it is descriptive enough of its functions to serve the purpose.)
• Habitual (Basically an accurate charactization of the function.)

Strictly speaking, Subjunctive, "Indefinite" future, and Imperative (which functions as a direct command, like imperatives in essentially all languages) are moods, i.e. they convery something about speaker attitude. It has always seemed to me that "mood" is a superfluous distinction when describing verbal forms, since it is a semantic notion which, in general, overlays the more fundamental concepts of tense or aspect, depending on the language. I do not use the term "mood" in this grammar.