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French verbs have a large number of simple (one-word) forms. These are composed of two distinct parts: the stem (or root, or radix), which indicates which verb it is, and the ending (inflection), which indicates the verb's tense (imperfect, present, future etc.) and mood and its subject's person (I, you, he/she etc.) and number, though many endings can correspond to multiple tense-mood-subject ...
The imperfect (abbreviated IMPERF) is a verb form that combines past tense (reference to a past time) and imperfective aspect (reference to a continuing or repeated event or state). It can have meanings similar to the English "was walking" or "used to walk".
This verb has different stems for different tenses. These are imperfect av- ; present subjunctive ai-future and conditional aur-; simple past and past subjunctive e-. Although the stem changes, the inflections of these tenses are as a regular -oir verb. In the present, not only are there stem changes, but the inflections are irregular as well:
The simple (one-word) forms are commonly referred to as the present, the simple past or preterite [b] (past tense, perfective aspect), the imperfect [b] (past tense, imperfective aspect), the future, the conditional, [c] the present subjunctive, and the imperfect subjunctive. However, the simple past is rarely used in informal French, and the ...
Aside from être and avoir (considered categories unto themselves), French verbs are traditionally [1] grouped into three conjugation classes (groupes): . The first conjugation class consists of all verbs with infinitives ending in -er, except for the irregular verb aller and (by some accounts) the irregular verbs envoyer and renvoyer; [2] the verbs in this conjugation, which together ...
evening sedn-eshe sit. PFV - PST. IPFV na on chardak-a veranda- DEF vecher sedn-eshe na chardak-a evening sit.PFV-PST.IPFV on veranda-DEF In the evening, he would sit down on the veranda. Here each sitting is an unanalyzed whole, a simple event, so the perfective root of the verb sedn 'sat' is used. However, the clause as a whole describes an ongoing event conceived of as having internal ...
Slavic innovated a new imperfect tense, which appeared in Old Church Slavonic and still exists in the same languages as the aorist. A new past tense was also created in the modern languages to replace or complement the aorist and imperfect, using a periphrastic combination of the copula and the so-called "l-participle", originally a deverbal ...
The Latin pluperfect was preserved in very early Old French as a past tense with a value similar to a preterite or imperfect. For example, the Sequence of Saint Eulalia (878 AD) has past-tense forms such as avret (< Lat habuerat), voldret (< Lat voluerat), alternating with past-tense forms from the Latin perfect (continued as the modern "simple ...