12
votes
What did the injunctive mood of Sanskrit do?
The injunctive can be defined formally as an imperfect or aorist verb without the augment (a-). Its main function is with the negative particle mā to express prohibition. In non-negative sentences it ...
- 23.7k
11
votes
Accepted
Are there languages with verb tenses, but no conjugation?
There are plenty of languages that do what you are looking for. In linguistic typology, languages that encode grammatical functions (such as tense) as separate words are called "isolating" (...
- 2,364
8
votes
Origin of the ا that ends the past tense of Arabic verbs for هُم?
In fact, alif ا does not mean anything particular and that differs it from the rest of the Arabic letters. It is a kind of a service letter, now it is a support for hamza, now it is written as a ...
- 17.7k
8
votes
Accepted
Do classical Arabic verb forms have a passive-active relationship like some Hebrew "buildings" do?
Typically Semitic languages form true passive verbs as "internal" passives formed by a change in the vowels of the stem, with "external" passives formed with affixes (possibly in ...
- 6,642
7
votes
Accepted
Why is the Romanian tense system so "simple", compared to other Romance languages?
The short answer: centuries of use of Old Church Slavonic instead of Latin or Romanian as a written language BUT note there is a tendency towards analytic tenses in spoken languages across Europe.
...
- 7,531
7
votes
Accepted
Is there a language where another verb form is simpler/more basic than the imperative?
Classical Arabic may provide an example: see section 6.1.3 of Brame 1970. His account is that the affirmative imperative is formed by truncating the subject prefix ta- from the 2nd person jussive, and ...
- 82.1k
7
votes
Accepted
What is it called when one "conjugates" adjectives?
As curiousdannii said, it's a type of inflection.
In Latin, adjectives were traditionally classified as nouns (nomina; specifically nomina adjectiva); the nouns that weren't adjectives were called "...
- 17.8k
7
votes
Why do verbs use 1st singular present active indicative instead of infinitive as the "canonical" or "representative" form in Latin?
Historical accident.
Roman (and Ancient Greek) grammarians seem to have thought of verb paradigms somewhat like noun paradigms: the forms of puella "girl" are puella, puellae, etc, and the ...
- 64.1k
6
votes
Accepted
Why does French use “be” as the auxiliary for a few verbs?
As usual in language evolution, having two auxiliaries wasn't a goal, things just happened this way (and in fact the long-term evolution is towards a single auxiliary).
There is an article in French ...
6
votes
How did verb conjugation by person, number and gender appear? Why do we still use it?
More theory than history for you, but one take on it:
Language evolution is an eternal tug-of-war between ease of articulation and information density. We want to say things quickly and learn how to ...
- 2,392
5
votes
Accepted
Where can you find a list of all nouns and verbs "forms" in each language?
Such a thing generally doesn't exist, since it wouldn't be useful.
For languages with complicated verbal morphology, such a list would take up several volumes without really communicating much. In ...
- 64.1k
5
votes
Why is verb conjugation difficult in many languages?
I don't think verbs are more confusing per se; instead, verbs tend to have more forms than nouns do. The reason for this comes from the role of verbs versus nouns in sentences, what kind of semantic ...
- 82.1k
5
votes
Is there a language where another verb form is simpler/more basic than the imperative?
For the German language there is a form called Erikativ or Inflektiv which is just the isolated verb stem. It is arguably simpler than the imperative singular because for some strong verbs there is a ...
- 29.8k
5
votes
Is there any language where the past tense is the base form of a verb?
First, it is important to be clear on what "most basic form" as described above covers. One notion is "structurally simplest", that is, "having the fewest added things". The other is "phonologically ...
- 82.1k
5
votes
Accepted
What is "mupigane" in Swahili?
Mupigane is not imperative, it is a subjunctive form of -pigana “beat one another = fight” (which is reciprocal of -piga “beat”) with the final -a substituted for the subjunctive -e.
The Wiktionary ...
- 17.7k
4
votes
Accepted
Is there any language in which the gender of the subject/object is marked in every verb conjugation?
In the Northeast Caucasian languages, nouns are divided into classes, that category is analogous to the Indo-European and Semitic genders.
Let's take Archi, a Northeast Caucasian language. It has 4 ...
- 17.7k
4
votes
How did verb conjugation by person, number and gender appear? Why do we still use it?
The systems employed in Germanic and Slavic result in part from inheritance from Proto-Indo-European, with changes (such as the loss of agreement in Norwegian, massive reduction in English, and the ...
- 82.1k
3
votes
Why is verb conjugation difficult in many languages?
As I used to tell my students,
Verbs have more fun
Every clause has a verb form in it, and there are always more things you can do to a verb than to a noun. In Latin, for instance, nouns are marked (...
- 10k
3
votes
Accepted
What is the origin of declension/conjugation classes?
The development of arbitrary morphological classification results from innumerable factors that obscure the relationship between form and function. For example, there may be a sound change that ...
- 82.1k
3
votes
Why does French use “be” as the auxiliary for a few verbs?
This is not unique to the French language and not really caused by the Latin origins of the language. German and Dutch have the same thing. They use "have" as auxiliary verb for most verbs and "are" ...
3
votes
Accepted
Why is Hungarian considered a mostly agglutinative language?
You're completely correct that Hungarian verb conjugation is quite fusional, but even there it's at most on par with IE languages. You mention Spanish, which does have a relatively neat TAM marker + ...
- 391
3
votes
What is "mupigane" in Swahili?
Mu- is either 2pl subject or object prefix, or cl. 1 object prefix. We can rule out an object prefix interpretation based on the syntax of -pigan- "beat each other" (too many object ...
- 82.1k
2
votes
Verb conjugation convergence
Corbett's 2007 paper attributes the term "overlapping suppletion" to Juge (1999).
Juge, Matthew L. 1999. On the rise of suppletion in verbal paradigms. Berkeley Linguistics Society 25.183–94.
2
votes
Is there any language where the past tense is the base form of a verb?
Probably this confusion is familiar within Indo-European linguistics. If we use the concept 'root' instead of 'base' we will understand this issue more accurately. In Indo-European languages, as far ...
- 1,068
2
votes
Is there a language in which personal suffix precedes the temporal suffix in conjugation?
(Note: the question has been clarified, making this answer no longer correct. This answer is about affixes, while the question is about suffixes.)
Many Bantu languages, including Swahili and Lingála. ...
- 64.1k
2
votes
What is it called when one "conjugates" adjectives?
I am not sure how those things work in English, but in Portuguese we don't use "conjugar" or "declinar" like that; one does not usually conjugate a verb when using it in a flexed form in normal speech ...
- 1,763
2
votes
Declension of the word "water" (maim) in Hebrew?
The form is mey מֵי, e.g. mey-hayam "the water of the sea".
ETA: As Colin Fine mentions below, there is also a longer alternate form meymey מֵימֵי.
- 10.9k
2
votes
Where can you find a list of all nouns and verbs "forms" in each language?
For the Saami languages, you can get paradigms here. E.g. select North Saami, All tools, Paradigm generation then (presumably) full paradigm. You will then fill in a word, optionally a part of speech, ...
- 82.1k
2
votes
Why is the Romanian tense system so "simple", compared to other Romance languages?
As far as I know know as a Romanian myself, who has studied grammar in school, Romanian has more than 5 tenses. First of all, we have verbal moods. These are personal and impersonal. The personal ...
- 121
Only top scored, non community-wiki answers of a minimum length are eligible