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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 ...
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 ...
As well as developing the strong verb system, Germanic also went on to develop two other classes of verbs: the weak verbs and a third, much smaller, class known as the preterite-present verbs, which are continued in the English auxiliary verbs, e.g. can/could, shall/should, may/might, must. Weak verbs originally derived from other types of word ...
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.
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.
Some verbs in English have historically derived forms that show change of valency in some causative verbs, such as fall-fell-fallen:fell-felled-felled; rise-rose-risen:raise-raised-raised; cost-cost-cost:cost-costed-costed. In valency marking languages, valency change is shown by inflecting the verb in order to change the valency.
Perfective verbs, whether derived or basic, can be made imperfective with a suffix. [4]: p84 Each aspect has a past form and a non-past form. The non-past verb forms are conjugated by person/number, while the past verb forms are conjugated by gender/number. The present tense is indicated with the non-past imperfective form.