Chapter 1: What is the deal with verbs?

Verbs are downright crazy, and they come in more forms than you can shake a stick at. And we’ll try and look at all the verb types in some semblance of order, common/easy to rare/hard. First, verbs are doing words, we all know that. And if we can do something, we can do something now, later or at some point before, which is pretty obvious. So that gives us the three Major Tenses, The past, the present and the future.

In English that gives us forms like:

Past I ate Present I eat Future I will eat

And I know what you’re thinking, that is obvious too, but just look at how little sense that actually makes. How different they are from one another, if you didn’t already know English, how would you know that they are related? Look at eat and ate. Well I guess they look a little alike, they have the same letters, maybe that is how we know they’re related. But then so do dog and god, so that throws that theory out the window. Never mind the future, which apparently needs a whole other word that we need to explain away somehow!

So we’ll get back to tenses in a moment, but what that mightily simple case illustrates, is the concept of verb roots. Something English never seemed to get a grasp on.

Where English defies scrutiny, let us look at another language that demonstrates the exact same concepts, but in a sane way. Or sane enough, ignoring the obvious insanity of one man sitting down and just inventing his own new language, grammar and all. Lets look at Esperanto.

So back to roots. A root can be painfully and clinically defined as “…an incomplete word conveying only an idea. It may consist of one or more syllables, but requires one or more letters to form it into a word.” Got it? Great. So a Root is related to a single idea. Then, we take that idea, and make it more explict. In english we could take the “idea of eating” and make it more concrete by giving it a time when this “idea of eating” takes place. So the future, we will-eat, in the present we eat (not ‘are eating’ that is a whole n’other kettle of fish) and in the past we eated. or ate. or whatever.

A more sensible approach would be to define the root of the word, which embodies the idea, and then define how to logically put that into tenses. This is how Esperanto works, and it is wonderfully simple, at least, to start.

So the idea of eating, we give that a root, say.. ‘manĝ’, why ‘manĝ’, well its a little like the French infinitive, ‘Manger’ and the Italian ‘Mangiare’. Now we have this idea, represented by the root ‘manĝ’, but that isn’t quite a word yet, it lacks any form you could say, just this silly little idea floating about in the grammarsphere. Lets make it solid, lets make it happen, like now. Manĝas. Done. we’ve taken the root, and made it a word, by giving it a tense, the present tense, by adding the suffix (something at the end) of -as. Simple as that. Manĝas. While we’re at it, lets give it a past and a future. Manĝis. Boom, past tense. And Manĝos. Easy as pie.

So we take a root, and we add some suffixes, and now we know when its happening. Nothing too insane there, it looks something a bit like this:

Manĝ-is ate Past Tense Manĝ-as eat Present Tense Manĝ-os will eat Future Tense

And that is about the easiest way i’ve ever seen conjugation (giving a root some tenses), hell most languages dont stick to their roots. Look at eat, there is no obvious root common to just the three basic tenses, never mind all the other possibilities we’re about to get into). Lets just take a moment to make that clear. To show how beautifully simple that system is, lets take some other roots, and play around. Hell lets look at some French too!

There are some pretty important verbs that we throw about an awful lot, like ‘to be’, ‘to go’, and ‘to have’. Lets look at how we’d do that, in Esperanto, English, and French. And for simplicities sake, we’ll look at everything from the ‘First Person Perspective’, I.e. From ‘I’. I should really have explained what an infinitive is before now. but lets just get that out of the way. The infinitive is the verb form we use when we talk about a verb, in english, its preceded by ‘to’, like ‘to come’, ‘to see’, and ‘to conquer’. In French its the usual IR,RE and ER verb endings, like Partir, Vendre, and Acheter.

In esperanto, we make the infinitive in another simple and regular way, we take the root, and add an i. So esti is from est, the root for ‘to be’, and -i to indicate it is an infinitive. Esti – To Be – Etre

               Esperanto        English            French Past           Mi est-is           I was                J’étais Present     Mi est-as          I am                 Je suis Future      Mi est-os          I will be           Je serais

Just look at those irregularities, how the heck are we supposed to guess ‘was’,’am’ and ‘will be’ are the same concept, just at different times, and boy don’t get me started on French. Lets just drive that point home, lets look at ‘to go’: Iri – To Go – Aller

               Esperanto        English          French Past           Mi ir-is              I went            J’allais Present     Mi ir-as             I go                Je vais Future       Mi ir-os            I will go        J’irais

Are you getting it now? Literally any verb we get in Esperanto, all we have to do, is take the root and add these endings, and boom, we’re done. That was 3 tenses done. In Full. One more for you, another that tripped me up in French all the time, ‘to have’: Havi – To Have – Avoir

                 Esperanto        English          French Past             Mi hav-is         I had               J’avais Present       Mi hav-as        I have             J’ai Future        Mi hav-os         I will have     J’aurais

Boy, just look at that french!

So that, is the first beautiful look at verbs, and hopefully, a way of looking at verb concepts without getting confusing.

This idea of past-present-future, are generally called tenses. And, in case you’re wondering, (and no, no one ever is), this system of adding endings is called agluttination, and it can be used for so much more… inflection!

Aside*: Agglutination is when you combine units that can be used separately with their own meaning. Like: al (to, towards) + iri (to go) = aliri (to approach). You can’t use “as/is/os” by themselves. They are just inflections on the root.

So we’ve seen roots like Est, Mang, Ir, which express a general idea or concepts, and (in esperanto at least) any word with that root, you know is concerning that concept. We’ve seen the infinitive form, which solidifies the abstract idea of the root into a word which describes the act of that idea, like esti (to be), Havi (to Have) and Iri (to go) And finally, or actually, first, we’ve look at the three major tenses, and how by simple modifications of the root, we can specify our actions, in time, with the simple endings:

-is Past -as Present -os Future

And I think i’ve written far more on those, than I strictly ought to.

Actually I lied. What we’ve just covered there, was something called the ‘Indicative Form’. I know right, who knew?

Aside: Wait Wait, hold up. lets just break that down a little bit more on the Esperanto side. Not only is it that simple, its actually a little cleverer than what we’ve just said. In time, there will be more verb forms which use the past, the present and the future, and they all follow a simple system, this agglutination principle. So, with this indicative verb form we have -is for past, -as for present and -os for future. Lets take that one step further, what if we strip off what makes this form ‘indicative’: we will have -i- for past, -a- for present, and, big surprise, -o- for future. and we call these the ‘Vowels of Tense’, because they are vowels, and they will always be used to indicate the tense regardless of verb form.

This gives us an even more general ‘word formula’, We take a Root, A Vowel of Tense, and A Form Ending, and we can make a verb! Right now, we only know the indicative form, -is,as,os, so we can safely assume here --s indicates indicative! But that is jumping way ahead The Indicative Form

We’ve just done that, its easy, you take a root and add one of the Main Tense Ending (-is,as,os) to indicate what tense we are in. Easy! Another beautiful feature of Esperanto is that when we do these ‘conjugations’, we don’t have to care about who is doing what, they all conjugate the same.

What do you mean? I hear you ask. ‘Surely you mean, that silly thing French does?’, Oh No No, we English do it too. A lot. and its a pain in the backside if you don’t learn it natively, because its just so irregular. Here we’ll see yet another gem in the crown of Esperanto regularity.

Lets look at something nice, ‘to love’. The root in Esperanto being ‘Am’, giving us the infinitive Ami.

Lets look at English first. and Conjugate To Love for each of the points of view, and we shall see that love, is not always what it seems.

I love You Love He Loves She Loves We Love You All Love (Plural) They Love

It seems pretty regular, and you may ask, what is the harm? Sure, He and She are different for some reason, and maybe I should pick another more irregular verb, but I don’t want to cherry pick. The fact is, love is unnecessarily complicated.

Lets add in along side, the Esperanto translations and we can see our first list of ‘Personal Pronouns’ (I,you,He,She…etc) (This is all nominative, but we’ll get to that another time)

I love Mi Amas You Love Vi Amas He Loves Li Amas She Loves Ŝi Amas We Love Ne Amas You Love Vi Amas (Plural) They Love Ili Amas

Look at that startling regularity. That is a beauty. Once you can remember all those Personal Pronouns, all you need is the verb form, the indicative form! And it never changes. To put that in perspective, look at the French, not only do they have the same number of personal pronouns, they also conjugate each form differently too!

I love Mi Amas J’aime You Love Vi Amas Tu aimes He Loves Li Amas Il aime She Loves Ŝi Amas Elle aime We Love Ni Amas Nous Aimons You Love Vi Amas Vouz Aimez (Plural/Formal) They Love Ili Amas Ils Aiment

I think we all agree learning one conjugation for each tense past, present, future, beats learning a whole new conjugation for each pronoun, and each tense! The French quickly get out of hand.

So that is about it for the Indicative, you need a word root, and you can affix any of the indicative endings for past (-is), present (-as), future (-os) as you deem necessary, and you don’t need to change it al all to fit the pronoun, thank the light.

Now, that was the past, present and future, what is left? Why the Imaginary of course, oh If we didn’t have to consider that, this would be a short guide! The Conditional Form

More commonly thought of as the What-If tense, as its not really happened, happening, or about to happen, its all… imaginary really. So If I said ‘I would marry you…’ its a conditional tense. I haven’t actually married anyone, it doesn’t belong strictly in the past, present or future. so we’re going to need another ending.

-us. That’ll do. Easy enough.

So if I said ‘I would say…’ we can now build that conditional tense up. If I told you the root for to say was ‘dir’ you could make the conditional tense: Mi Dirus… That would cover it!

That is pretty simple stuff for the grand imagination of the conditional sense. Just like that, every verb could be picked from the realms of time, and moved to the imaginary… The Imperative Form

Or the commanding tone. Sure, we have the infinitive, say… ‘to learn’ but what if we wanted to command someone to learn, we don’t shout the infinitive at them, ‘To Learn! To learn’, nor the Indicative ‘Learned, Learn, Will Learn’! We have a specific form for commands, and we call that the imperative, and it is imperative you learn it. Fortunately its super simple… In Esperanto at any rate.

It’s just another ending to add to the list, this time, -u! Just u! its short, its sweet, and it is commanding! And how do we tell someone to learn, i’ll give you a hint, the root for learn is … ‘lern’ So… lernu! which is why the biggest esperanto learning site is http://www.lernu.net! It’s in the imperative form!

Notice, that like the conditional form, the imperative is not necessarily tied to the past, present or future, so avoids the use of the ‘Vowels of Tense’, i,a, or o!

That is the end of the basic forms, once you’ve got your head around that, we’ll look at some more interesting modes. Like, why haven’t we seen any ‘ing’ verbs yet? and if we can say all this already, do we even need to?

So to summarise these concepts we have:

The Infinitive: The basic form of a verb, before we committing the verb to a particular tense.

-i The Indicative: Where the verbs express a simple statement of fact, like I ate, I eat, I will eat. Past -i-s Present -a-s Future -o-s Where we break the endings (-is,as,os) into the Vowels of Tense (-i-,-a-,-o-) (VoT), and the indicative ending, -s. The Conditional: Used in imaginary and hypothetical situation such as ‘I Would do’, or ‘if I Should ..’ -us The Imperative: Used when your are giving a command or instruction, like ‘run Forrest, run!’ -u So that should be the end of that. Participles This. This is exactly why i’ve set out to write this little guide. Bloody Participles. Here, is where we can get muddled in all sorts of specialised abstract vocabularies, and confusions. So I’m going to try and get through this in lots of little chunks and likely reiterate as I get things straight in my head too. So we have these verbs we’ve been talking about, the doing words. We also have those other types of words, the nouns (objects), the adjectives (descriptors) and those odd little adverbs (describing verbs, adjectives, other adverbs and even entire clauses*). Yet sometimes, we might see a verb in a weird place, and not even think about it. Lets look at the phrase ‘I finished the marathon tired’ It all makes sense, and if we break it down, we have the construction: ’ I Finished (strictly a pronoun followed by a past tense indicative verb form) The Marathon (strictly a definite article, followed by a noun) Tired Which all makes perfect sense. But what if here we change it up a bit, and change the phrase to: ‘I finished the marathon walking’ What we’ve gone and done there, is taken a verb form, ‘to walk’, and given it the same function as an adjective. Clever, but how? By the simple addition of the -ing! Walking is not acting as a verb here, rather, walking is describing how you finished the marathon, it has gone full adjective! This right here is the essence of the Participle. It is taking a verb, and changing it, so that it acts as an adjective. In this case, this is the Present Participle. We form the present participle in English using the -ing suffix, but, confusingly, not all -ing words are Present participles! As a quick aside, In esperanto we form the Present Participle using the ending: -anta Cleverly this ending is actually a compound ending, which tells us a little more. Take for example: marŝanta – walking We have: marŝ-a-nt-a : marŝ- : -a- -nt- -a We can see that we still have the same root, and as this is a present participle, we use the Vowel of Tense -a- to indicate the present, we have a new suffix, the -nt- to indicate that this is a participle form (-ing), and finally the -a ending, as we see in all adjectives in esperanto, why? because the verb we started with is now acting as an adjective! With this nice break down, the quick witted among you should be able to see how to form the past and even future participles?! Hold your horses. The Past Participle So, participles being participles, as they so often are, involve taking one of our precious verbs and warping them into the role of an adjective. So I’m sure you can guess that now, we can do that in the past tense too. Because why shouldn’t we be able to describe a thing, in a way that indicates a time, at the same time! Now in English, the past is a very irregular thing, and, whereas the present participle can be said to take the -ing ending, the past can be said to take the -ed/-d/-t endings, but it’s never really that simple. Lets look at some examples Verb Past Participle (acting as an Adjective) To Look Looked (-ed ending) – nice and easy that. To Sleep Slept (-t ending) – a little more messy, we somehow dropped an ‘e’ somewhere along the line, but language cant always be easy right? to Say Said (-d ending) – ahh, we seem to have found an ‘i’, and in picking that up, misplaced a ‘y’. but if we must have rules, we’ll call -d and ending too for the sake of it. How do we identify these cursed past participles then? All Present participles have -ing endings, but not all -ing endings are present participles. The same goes here for the past too. Not all Past Participles are -ed endings (as we’ve seen) but also not all -ed endings are past participles. In English, unfortunately, the -ed endings are indistinguishable from the simple indicative past! But we can at least get the concept straight if not the rules eh? Lets look at some examples in English, like amazed, filled, troubled. If I said ‘I amazed the students’, we can hopefully see, that this is the simple past tense. It is a verb, to Amaze, and we jolly well did it, and in the past no less. That is just good old fashioned indicative past. no past participles here. Now had I said ‘I am amazed by students’, we get a wiff of something different. I am not doing anything here, but I am being described as being something, being amazed no less. We’re fully in the realm of adjectives here, and this makes it the past participle. Lets expand on that: ‘The bus is filled with odd characters’. Once again, we’re looking at another adjective right here folks. Another regular past participle, distinguishable from the simple past, by usage alone! ‘Underpants should be worn and not heard’. Now this one may be a it more tricky! Worn, the past tense of to wear, but here, worn is an adjective too! I do hope that clears things up a bit. Past participles are often seen with -d (said), -t (slept), and -n (broken) endings! Once again, Esperanto takes a clear and logical shot at this. Lets take amazed. We have the infinitive form as: mirigi. And we can quickly and easily follow the same practice as above! We have: miriginta mirig-i-nt-a : mirig- : -i- -nt- -a Mi estas miriginta de lernantinoj I am amazed by students – Past Participle Mi mirigis la lernantinoj I amazed the students – Past Tense Indicative The Future Participle Doesnt exist in english, so i’m going to be at a loss as to how to demonstrate it well… But lets theorise some possibilities here. Lets look at the verb, amaze. We can look amazed (past participle) We can look amazing (present participle) But can be look like we will be amazed in the future. A preparedness to be amazed soon? Maybe we can. I like to think we can. When we know something is about to blow our minds, we anticipate it. We look almost-amazed, soon-to-be-amazed, pre-amazed. English is failing us here. But Not Latin, Latin has Future Participles! Think maybe of classical music, if you see an orchestra all tune up, all the beautiful instruments polished and ready, sweet notes filling the air in preparation, all the musicians getting into position. You’re not totally amazed yet, but you know you’re about to be. You’re on the edge of the seat. You are filled with pre-amazement. If we want to look actively pre-amazed, look no further than Esperanto, and just change that Vowel of Tense! We have: mirigonta mirig-o-nt-a : mirig- : -o- -nt- -a Mi estas mirigonta de la orkestreko ekorkestro (A nice little addition here, the Esperanto for orchestra is orkestro. But it is not the orchestra precisely, that I am pre-amazed at, but the start of it. We can add ek- to indicate the start of something, so in this case ek-orkestro means, the start of the orchestra!) Aside*: “Ek” was originally conceived as a prefix,and is more commonally use as one! And that right there, is why the future-participle can be amazing.