Re: where do so many tenses come from?

Ruud Harmsen wrote:

_Trato disso amanha~_ 'I handle that tomorrow'
_Vou la' no Verao_ 'I go there next summer'
_Vejo isso depois_ 'I see that later on'
_Ja' pedimos_ 'Soon we order' = 'We'll order in just a moment'
_Ja' pedimos_ 'Already we ordered' = 'We've already ordered'

The last one is just a curosity, in that it relies on the imperfect

Perfect, isn't it? The imperfect would be 'pedíamos'.

Of course. The perfect is so rare in comparison to the pluperfect that my terminology sometimes slips. Not that it is very well anchored, anyway.

I learned the sense of 'já' in your first example from notes at shop
doors announcing "volto já" = "I return soon" = "I'll be back in a
minute or so (could be an hour or more; lunch?)".

The portuguese are notorious for being helpless with time and schedules. 'Um minutinho' can last more than an hour, and if someone asks you for a second, you may as well go have a cup of coffee. Of course, then they can be ready in one minute, and will have to wait for you to finish.

In both (_volto ja´_ and _ja´ volto_), the sense is the same, since the verb is in present form (while actually referring to the future). There's this idea that _volto/vou ja´_ implies greater immediacy, since the first word denotes the actual action (see below, though).

Could that be a way to disambiguate your restaurant example? "Pedimos
já" for 'we'll order in a minute"? Or are both orders possible for
both senses?

Post- _ja´_ is unambiguously 'soon', so there would be no confusion (though in this particular situation, you wish to emphasize the adverb, so you generally move it to the beginning - which is not to say that your example doesn't occur, but it's a bit less frequent).

Or use a different verb, such as 'encomendar', so that the difference
is between "já encomendamos" and "já encomendámos"? Or isn't
"encomendar" a usable verb in this situation? My small nl>pt dict.
gives pedir and encomendar for Dutch "bestellen", but the larger one
doesn't have "pedir". Can I safely report that as an omission?

In their plain sense, 'encomendas' involve the postal service. Whereas anything involving the postal service usually doesn't qualify as a 'pedido'.

Or order as an individual instead of as a group, já peço / ja pedi?

Yes, both occur.

More important than mere possibility, however, is statistical use. It's not just that present+adverb is possible in portuguese, rather that it is the common and preferred way to do it. There's a form with _ir_ as an auxilliary, which more or less covers 'going to'.

And the future ("pediramos") exist conjugationally, but isn't used
much anymore.

Pediremos. To be honest, I don't think it was ever much used. We could return to the 'inherently rare' discussion of yesteryear, but...

Pediramos was the galician version of pedi´ramos, but last year they decided to just go with pedi´ramos, which has the majority.

The matter is very complicated, within single languages
and especially between them. E.g. the perfeito composto (he
hecho/tenho feito) seems to be much more frequent in Spanish than in
Portuguese, although the described usage rules seem to be the same.

Ruud, Ruud, didn't we have a lengthly thread on this a while ago? The 'tenho' + participle tense in portuguese is never a perfect; usually it is a frequentative along the lines of english 'have been' + gerund. It is fundamentally different from the spanish / french compound perfect, and in fact it was only at that time that I came to know the difference between he hecho and hice. And I probably would/will have a hard time getting it right if I need, not because I'll use he hecho for tenho feito (a possible connection between the two never captured my attention), but because I'll use he hecho for fiz, and hice hardly ever.
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