where do so many tenses come from?

Can someone enlighten me on the origin of the numerous grammatical tenses we have in our languages like in English and Spanish?
Specifically, I find the many tenses describing past actions (completed or started in the past) kind of redundant. Not all languages have that broad spectrum of tenses and I'm basically interested in the reason for that. What happened in the past to come up with so many of them in some languages?

E.g. in English:

I had done smth.
I did smth.
I have done smth.

I had been doing smth.
I was doing smth.
I have been doing smth.

Why does English have these all these slightly different in meaning tenses? Why did it happen to English to emphasize the relative time between an action in the past and other actions?

Why did it not happen to Russian, for instance? Why is it enough for it to have just two forms (perfect and imperfect/continuous) instead of the six I listed above?

Spanish is like English in this respect. Interestingly, Spanish seems to have even more grammatical tenses, some of which are rarely used.

Have there been any studies on this?

Alex

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Relevant Pages

  • Re: where do so many tenses come from?
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  • Re: where do so many tenses come from?
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    ... proliferation of past tenses in English is invalid since these tenses were ... As for the past tenses of English and Spanish: the first thing to point out ... Western European tense system', which seems to have reached its peak ...
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