Verb Morphology in the Old Tongue

Verbs in the Old Tongue do not display a rich [case system] like that of some Indo-European languages, however it does employ some level of [inflection] for grammatical purposes. The Old Tongue makes use of 5 distinct inflected forms which are fairly consistent across most verbs where the forms are attested:

1. Present: the form which is used to construct sentences like "I walk", "you run", "we sleep", "they fight", "it grows", etc.
2. Present Participle: the form which indicates the ongoing act or state of doing something, like "running", "covering", "blowing", etc.
3. Resultative Participle: the form which indicates the resulting state after an action has started. e.g. "bound", "sworn", "having run", "having begun attacking".
4. Perfective Participle/Past:
   • Perfective Participle: the form which indicates a completed action, that is now finished and no longer occurring: "attacked", "ran", "walked", "ate", etc.
   • Past: indicating a specific, finite action or event that happened in the past. e.g. "I ate the bread earlier", "she channeled Saidar".
5. Future: indicating an intent or possibility of a future action. e.g. "I will travel to the place", "I can go tomorrow", "they will learn".

In practice, Old Tongue realizes the Perfective Participle and the Past forms as the same form, so there are a total of 5 forms.

Verb Forms

Present

The present form of a verb does not have any consistent morphology. It often a bare stem, but not always, and sometimes it carries sounds which disappear from the stem for constructing other forms. For example, vakar inflects to vakat for constructing the Present Participle, and derived words use the stem vaka- or vak-.

Present Participle

The present participle form is not uniform, but usually terminates in -at, -in, or -en. There are patterns to which verbs appear to take which forms.

Resultative Participle

The resultative participle form either terminates in -ae or in -ien, and almost always -ae. -ien verbs are verbs that seem to be related to some kind of location, place, or a sense of direction or going to or coming from.

Perfective Participle/Past

The perfective participle/past form always ends in -ane or very occasionally -ne. It is more regular than the prior forms.

Future

The future form is also more regular and always ends in -anu or -nu. The -nu ending only occurs when the vowel a combines with some other vowel that reduces to another vowel; e.g. zavilat/zavilar to zavinu. The future (and past) forms sometimes take simplified or truncated stems, e.g. jalou to jalanu.