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In PIE, *h 1 es-was an athematic verb in -mi; that is, the first person singular was *h 1 esmi; this inflection survives in English am, Pashto yem, Persian am, Sanskrit asmi, Bengali first-person verb ending -ām, Old Church Slavonic esmĭ, etc. This verb is generally reconstructed for Proto-Indo-European thus: [1]
Languages differ in the way they express such meanings; some of them use the copular verb, possibly with an expletive pronoun like the English there, while other languages use different verbs and constructions, like the French il y a (which uses parts of the verb avoir ' to have ', not the copula) or the Swedish finns (the passive voice of the ...
Proto-Indo-European verbs reflect a complex system of morphology, more complicated than the substantive, with verbs categorized according to their aspect [a], using multiple grammatical moods and voices, and being conjugated according to person, number and tense.
This class merged with the Class III stative verbs in Gothic, Old High German and (mostly) Old Norse, but vanished in the other Germanic languages. Class IV verbs were formed with a suffix -n-(-nō-in the past), e.g. Gothic fullnan "to become full", past tense ik fullnōda. This class vanished in other Germanic languages; however, a significant ...
In Old French, the verb ester < stāre maintained the Proto-Romance meaning of "to stand, stay, stop". In modern French, this verb has almost totally disappeared (see below for the one exception), although the derivative verb of rester ("to remain") exists, and some parts of the conjugation of ester have become incorporated into être "to be ...
A verb that does not follow all of the standard conjugation patterns of the language is said to be an irregular verb. The system of all conjugated variants of a particular verb or class of verbs is called a verb paradigm; this may be presented in the form of a conjugation table.
German verbs may be classified as either weak, with a dental consonant inflection, or strong, showing a vowel gradation ().Both of these are regular systems. Most verbs of both types are regular, though various subgroups and anomalies do arise; however, textbooks for learners often class all strong verbs as irregular.
In French, some Germanisms are due to the experiences in the Second World War, such as witz for a bad joke or threatening (in German, Witz is just joke) and ersatz for ersatz coffee (German Ersatzkaffee, but more usually Muckefuck, itself probably a Francesism from mocca faux), or as an adjective meaning make-believe, fall-back, i.e. (as in ...