Verb aspect issues

[Alomar]

So in Mychai verbs are marked for tense and aspect and currently I'm a little uneasy about how the whole scheme is set up and how I'm dividing meaning.

For example:
ve - to carry

I think the above chart is pretty self explanatory. The stem is "ve" and the final vowel of any verb dictates which conjugation paradigm it follows. The endings are then attached to the stem after the vowel is dropped. Pretty standard IE thing there. The perfect forms are built with reduplication where the reduplicated consonant is mutated to a nasal and the insertion of a vowel that marks the perfect aspect. The perfect is transparently derived from the imperfective.
Don't worry, not all verbs follow this paradigm and not all are regular. I just gave you a well behaved one.

My question is whether I even need a perfect? I used to have a perfect derived from the perfective and one derived from the imperfective to have the distinction between "I have been carrying" and "I have carried". But the "I have been carrying form" is now absorbed into the present imperfective form, just like in German.
Should I just do the same thing with Perfect in general? So "I have carried that all the way here, now you better appreciate it!" just be "I carried that all the way here, now you better appreciate it".

See, even in English those sound equivalent.

[Creyeditor]

I guess, you can do what you want here
If you want a distinction, it is important for you to know, what is the difference?
If you want to use the same form, you have to know how different meanings are expressed with other tools, like particles and such.
I really lke the reduplication plus nasalization thing, please don't delete it

[Trailsend]

My question is whether I even need a

Probably not.

...perfect?

Nope! Lots of languages get along quite well without a morphological perfect distinction.

What you really want to do is think carefully about the communicative need that the perfect verb form fills in actual situations, and then decide how your language would fill that need without using a specially reserved verb form. There are all kinds of ways you could do this—you could do it semantically, syntactically, pragmatically, etc...

One way I've heard the meaning of the English perfect aspect explained is that it indicates "prior events with current relevance". So, if you say "I went to Spain," then you're focused on that past time frame in which the trip to Spain occurred. But if you say, "I have been to Spain," then you're conveying the same information—that at some point in the past, you went to Spain—but you are highlighting the present moment, and how the trip to Spain relates to or impacts it.

So, if you were speaking Mychai and found yourself with this same communicative need—the need to talk about a past event while highlighting its impact on the present moment—what would you do? Sure, you could use a special verb form. But there's all kinds of other things you could do. Maybe there's some syntactic transformation that happens*, or maybe you don't mark the difference on the sentence itself at all, and instead just surround it with appropriate context to make it clear that you're more interested in the present moment, and not the past time period when you went to Spain.

* Consider how English can take the phrase "I went to Spain last year" and twist it into "It was Spain that I went to last year", in order to mark "Spain" as (perhaps) a correction to a misunderstanding. You could do something like this with a similar (or heck, dissimilar) transformation to add the "perfect" connotation to your verb.

[Xing]

My question is whether I even need a perfect?

You don't need a perfect. Just like you don't need a distinction between perfective and imperfective, or between past, present and future tense. But there is nothing wrong with it

As far as I know, languages with a perfective-imperfective-perfect distinction are attested. (Though the exact use of the respective aspects may be slightly different in different languages.)

One could even add a distinction between perfective and imperfective perfect ("I have carried" vs "I have been carrying"). But that might be a bit superfluous - the purpose of the perfect is to focus on the relevance of some (past) action for someone's present state - rather than on the internal structure of the action.

The perfect may be used to indicate a form of stative aspect. Like "he is seated" for "he is sits/is sitting", "I have drunk" for "I'm drunk", or "It has darkened" for "it's dark/it's night".