Alien Grammar Has 847 Tenses, Linguists Report With Visible Exhaustion

A team of xenolinguists at the SETI Institute has completed a preliminary grammar of the Centauri B language and announced, with the hollow eyes of people who have stared into an abyss that stared back in 847 different temporal modes, that the language contains 847 distinct verb tenses. English has twelve. Mandarin Chinese, depending on analysis, has between zero and one. The Centauri B language has 847, each describing a specific temporal, modal, and evidential relationship between the speaker, the action, and what the research team has taken to calling 'the vibe of the universe at the time.' 'There's a tense for actions you performed in the past that you now regret but would do again,' said lead linguist Dr. Sofia Reyes, reading from a chart that covers an entire wall. 'There's a separate tense for actions you performed in the past that you now regret and would not do again. There's a third tense for actions you performed in the past that you should regret but don't.' The grammar also includes tenses for hypothetical events in alternate timelines, events that are occurring right now but in a dream, events that will definitely happen but not to you, and a tense that the team has been unable to translate but that appears to mean 'something that is happening for the first time but feels familiar.' 'We think that last one is their word for deja vu,' said Dr. Reyes. 'They grammaticalized deja vu. It's a tense. You conjugate for it.' The discovery has thrown the first contact translation effort into disarray. The original response to the Centauri B greeting, drafted in English and translated into the alien language, was returned with a note that the team translates as: 'Your verb tenses are so imprecise that we cannot determine if your message is a greeting, a threat, or a recipe.' Dr. Reyes has requested a budget increase and a team therapist. Both have been approved.