Questions tagged [conjugation]
Modification of a verb from its basic form to indicate information on person, number, gender, tense, aspect, mode, voice or other grammatical categories.
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Why does the "passat perifràstic" use "anar" as an auxiliary?
In all other romance languages, to go + infinitive means that the action will happen in a near future, which makes sense intuitively, because metaphorically, we move toward an event which has not ...
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Does Uzbek have irregular verbs?
Does Uzbek language have any irregular verbs regarding conjugation?
If so could you provide these verbs or a source?
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What are examples covering the spectrum of possibilities of inflection types across languages?
I am currently looking at Turkish adjective intensification where they are formed by adding a letter in the middle of the word, according to some rules (after first consonant + vowel):
siyah ("...
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What did the injunctive mood of Sanskrit do?
I have read that Vedic Sanskrit had five grammatical moods a verb could take; indicative, optative, imperative, subjunctive, and injunctive; four of them I understand the function of through other ...
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Conjugation stem changes in Portuguese
Currently, I am learning Portuguese. I have some knowledge of Spanish as well.
The biggest difference in conjugation (indicative present tense) that I have found between Spanish and Portuguese is that ...
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Do classical Arabic verb forms have a passive-active relationship like some Hebrew "buildings" do?
In Hebrew, the 7 verb forms (or "buildings") can be associated into passive-active pairs, e.g. Pa'al - Nif'al, Hef'il-Huf'al, Pi'el-Pu'al (and Hitpa'el on its own). So we can say e.g. "...
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What is "mupigane" in Swahili? [closed]
In this sentence: "Wazazi waliwaambia watoto wao: 'Badala ya kufa nyumbani nendeni mupigane.'", I assume "mupigane" is a conjugated form of the verb "kupiga" (fight). ...
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Why do verbs use 1st singular present active indicative instead of infinitive as the "canonical" or "representative" form in Latin?
I see many dictionaries use the 1st person singular present active indicative form as the "canonical" or dictionary entry for verbs in Latin. For example, a typical dictionary would show ...
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Why is Hungarian considered a mostly agglutinative language?
Hungarian is often used as the prototypical example of a heavily agglutinative, synthetic language, and with regards to noun declension and derivational morphology this is doubtless true; Hungarian ...
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How did verb conjugation by person, number and gender appear? Why do we still use it?
I'm Russian native,learning German and English. I'm interested in teaching myself some linguistics.
Russian verb inflects for person, number in present and future tense; for gender in past tense.
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Why is verb conjugation difficult in many languages?
In at least the languages that I know or have been learning (Japanese, Filipino, English, Spanish), the conjugation of verbs has always been a stumbling block. Conjugation is utterly confusing with so ...
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Origin of the ا that ends the past tense of Arabic verbs for هُم?
Arabic has a lot of intricate (finicky) qualities, but one of the things that's very nice about it is that spelling is usually phonemic (with the consonants and long vowels, anyway).
But the وا at the ...
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Origin of "will" in Germanic, wouldn't it be subjunctive?
Small print: This is language specific about English, but tangential to Germanic to a certain degree that is likely out of ELU's scope. .
As a follow-up to this Q and several ones like it about the ...
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Dataset of English verb forms (conjugation)
What are some exhaustive/accurate datasets of English verb forms? From this closed SO question, I see:
GCIDE_XML, which contains plurals, alt spellings and conjugations, and is in XML format.
Need ...
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Are there languages with verb tenses, but no conjugation?
More specifically, what I'm looking for is this: verbs have no conjugation or inflection; the only form is the infinitive. The language does have verb tenses, (past, present, future, conditional, etc),...
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Where can you find a list of all nouns and verbs "forms" in each language? [closed]
The only languages for which I have found a book (not even a webpage) is for Hebrew and Arabic. Are there books or webpages that contain all the noun declensions and verb "conjugations" (or noun and ...
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Why is the Romanian tense system so "simple", compared to other Romance languages?
It appears like Romanian has only 5 inflected/conjugated tenses (excluding imperative), while all other Romance languages have much more. For example, in Spanish, French and Italian, there are 7(8) ...
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The background reason of the way of conjugation of Romanian verbs (indicative present tense) for -a ending verbs
As I have encountered a lot, some Romanian infinitives ending in -a (-a ending group) stick to the "-ez" suffix for indicative present tense conjugation. I know basically and normally we ...
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Is there a language where another verb form is simpler/more basic than the imperative?
Imperative tends to be the simplest verb form, cf. Latin dic, fac. English is not very inflecting, so other verb forms can be just as simple as the imperative. Nevertheless, is there a language, where ...
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Is there a language where semantic aspect determines which tense is unmarked in a verb?
For every language there is a tense that is morphologically closest to the root, e.g. English present is more basic than perfect since perfect either adds a suffix -(e)d or has ablaut as tense marker. ...
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Is there any language where the past tense is the base form of a verb?
The fictional language Flaidish has this feature. But I recently found out about a natural language (Mixtec) where the present isn't the base form of a verb, its the future tense.
I found this ...
user19661
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Is there a language in which personal suffix precedes the temporal suffix in conjugation?
A fictional example:
zelun (zel- (verb stem: "to make leather") + u (personal suffix, 3rd person sg.) + n (temporal suffix, present))
vs. zelud (u (3rd sg.) + d (preterite))
zelun = "He/She/It is ...
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What is it called when one "conjugates" adjectives?
If one conjugates verbs and declines nouns, what is it called when an adjective is "conjugated," as it is in French to agree in gender and plurality with the noun? (E.g. "beau" is masculine singular ...
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Declension of the word "water" (maim) in Hebrew? [closed]
What is the conjugated (that is used in smikhut) form of the word "maim" (water)? Is it "maim" or "mai"? (I'm asking about ancient biblical Hebrew, but I am almost sure it is the same as in modern ...
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Why does French use “be” as the auxiliary for a few verbs? [duplicate]
In French, there are a set of 17 verbs lovingly called the Vandertramps:
Devenir (to become)
Revenir (to come back)
.
&
Monter (to climb)
Rentrer (to reenter)
Sortir (to exit)
...
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What is the origin of declension/conjugation classes?
Languages with declension and conjugation usually have multiple declension and conjugation classes.
If one were to invent a language with declension or conjugation, one would probably introduce only ...
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Is there any language in which the gender of the subject/object is marked in every verb conjugation?
Besides Spanish where you have comerla (feminine, eat her) or comerlo (masculine, eat him), but only works for certain verb conjugations.
Any other language where the gender of objects/subjects is ...
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Realization of person in conjugation
The conjugation of a verb often marks person and number.
Is there a language where one can actually separate these two traits or are they purely analytical?
(e.g. one could image a language where a ...
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General Grammatical forms of verbs
In generalizing what I have learned from Japanese "conjugations" I learned quite a bit.
I have come to the realization that the same verb forms ARE present in English although English uses cue words ...
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Common change of conjugation of the verbs in spoken languages?
Is the natural tendency of the verbs in spoken language towards more or fewer conjugations?
For example, in my language, we use conjugations related to time, person, etc.
In English we have ...
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Common change of conjugation of the verbs in spoken languages?
Is the natural tendency of the verbs in spoken language towards more or fewer conjugations?
For example, in my language, we use conjugations related to time, person, etc.
In English we have ...
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Verb conjugation convergence
Portuguese has a strange coincidence in the preterit perfect tense of the verbs ir (to go) and ser (to be): they are conjugated exactly equally.
Portuguese — English to go | English to be
Eu fui — ...
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Does any language conjugate adverbs?
Many definitions of adverbs, like those in Polish grammar theory, state that adverbs are an invariable part of speech (they do not conjugate with verbs) in opposite to adjectives, which decline with ...
user1609
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what would be the hypothetic result of *βεβλεπνται in Ancient Greek?
I'm talking about the third plural form of medium/passive perfect, in Ancient Greek.
My grammar explains that some very simple verb like παιδεύω may be inflected that way :
1S πεπαίδευ-μαι > ...
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Why are there inflections?
I'm from a Chinese background. I wonder why there are inflections in many languages, as compared with no inflections in Chinese. I personally suppose that a language should originate simple and easy ...
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Why are irregular verbs usually common words?
Whilst searching for the origin of irregular verbs, I came across this forum, which points out, among other things, that irregular verbs are more often than not common words. Is there a reason for ...
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ephelcystic nu of contract verbal forms in Ancient Greek
Since some verbal forms may have an ephelcystic nu (imperfect.3S : ἐπαίδευε/ἐπαίδευεν), I would like to know if [un/]contract forms too may have this ending, as if we had ἐτίμαεν instead of ἐτίμαε and ...
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finite/non-finite verb = conjugated/non-conjugated verb
Are those terms totally interchangeable in all contexts (finite = conjugated) (non-finite = conjugated) or are there slight meaning differences?
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What are the rules to infer the vowel in-fix in Hebrew conjugation?
Hebrew verbs are based on roots. A root can provide different verbs through processes of derivation called binyanim. Each verb can be conjugated by in-fixing vowels. For instance (using the first ...
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Suppletion vs. missing verb forms
Japanese is famous for its very few irregular verbs, but there are some cases where verb-forms are missing and other verbs/adjectives are used instead.
For example, (in standard Japanese) the verb ある ...
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Are there languages with a totally regular conjugation for "to be" outside Quechua?
I recently noticed that most languages have an irregular conjugation for the verb To be. I say almost because I don't know all languages, but the ones I've seen all have some irregularity sooner or ...
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Why do English verbs inflect so little, especially in regard to "person"?
Most Indo-European languages have verbs which endings change according to the person. I made a table with the most common (and close) languages and focussed on the category of person and the present ...
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