Præteritumpreteritum

Præteritumpreteritum is a term used in some Scandinavian linguistic descriptions to refer to a past tense form that expresses an action occurring before another past reference point. The phrase literally means “past of the past” and is often equated with what many grammars call the pluperfect or past perfect.

In usage, præteritumpreteritum describes anteriority within a past-time frame. It is typically discussed in the context of sequence of tenses, indirect speech, or narrative distance, where a past action is embedded inside another past clause. For example, in indirect speech, a speaker may report a past claim about a prior event using a past-perfect form to indicate that the event happened before the time of speaking or before the time of the reporting verb. In many descriptions, this corresponds to the familiar pluperfect construction found across languages, such as had + past participle in English.

The term is not universally standardized and appears primarily in descriptive grammars or cross-dialect surveys within the Scandinavian tradition. Some grammars treat the prerogative of anterior past as a distinct category for clarity, while others analyze it simply as the pluperfect or as a periphrastic past formation, depending on the language and the morphological or auxiliary system involved.

Relation to other tenses is central: præteritumpreteritum contrasts with præteritum (simple past) and with perfektum or førtid/førnutid varieties, which mark actions connected to the present or to a different temporal axis. Because the category is not universally adopted, readers should consult the specific grammar to see how a language in question handles past-tense embedding and anteriority.