Verbs, as we have learned, are words of action, and we’ll start taking action on them by looking at Isian. As usual, Isian is the simpler of our two conlangs. Its verbs are fairly straightforward, and they shouldn’t be that hard to understand, even for speakers of English and other morphologically lacking languages.
The stem
Like nouns, Isian verbs start with a stem. This can be any verbal morpheme or (as we’ll see later on) a combination of them. For now, we’ll stick with the simplest form: a single morpheme stem representing a “basic” verb.
Most Isian verbal stems end in vowels, though we’ll see that there are a few very important exceptions. Some examples you’ve already met include coto “walk” and hama “eat”, and we’ll use these as our main running examples.
Tense, aspect, and mood
The three main verbal categories of tense, aspect, and mood are often lumped together, mostly because many languages make a mess of them. Isian is little different in this regard. There are four main verbal forms: present tense, past tense, perfect, and subjunctive.
Past and present should be obvious, even if you’re not a linguist. Perfect is a bit like the English pluperfect (“has walked”, “has eaten”); to a first approximation, they’re essentially identical, but we’ll see differences pop up later on. The subjunctive is a bit harder to explain. Fortunately, we won’t be using it much this time around. For now, just know that it can’t be used for the main verb of a sentence.
Now, this doesn’t mean that Isian has no way of talking about events in the future, for instance. But the language doesn’t mark these finer shades of meaning directly on the verb. Instead, it uses auxiliary verbs, much like English. As an example, nos acts as a future tense marker when placed before a verb: nos coto “he will walk”. We’ll see a whole list of the main auxiliaries in a moment, but we need a quick digression first.
Agreement
One wrinkle of Isian verbs is agreement, also called concord. Each Isian verb takes a specific inflectional ending to mark the person and number of its subject. For example, coto can mean “he walks”, but to say “I walk”, we must use coton. There are four different sets of agreement markers, one for each of the three main persons (first, second, and third), while the fourth specifically marks the first-person plural, equivalent to English “we”. (We’ll say that Isian had plurals in the other two persons, but they’re gone now.)
Thus, we have a total of 16 different verbal forms. That’s way more than the maximum five of English (“eat”, “eats”, “ate”, “eaten”, “eating”), but it’s a far cry from the dozens found in Romance languages. It’s a lot, but it’s manageable. And it all fits into a neat table, too:
| chere | 1st Sg. | 1st Pl. | 2nd Pers. | 3rd Pers. |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Present | cheren | cherema | cherel | chere |
| Past | chereta | cherenda | cherelsa | cheres |
| Perfect | cherecan | cherencan | cherecal | cherec |
| Subjunctive | cheredi | cheredim | cherelde | chered |
Here, I used chere “see”, but the endings are the same for all regular verbs. The first column is all the first-person singular, so its English translations would be “I see”, “I saw”, “I have seen”, and something like “that I see”. (Subjunctives are hard.) The same follows for the other columns: first-person plural is “we”, second is “you”, and third can be “he”, “she”, “it”, or “they”.
Auxiliary verbs
Most of the other tenses and aspects and moods are constructed in Isian by using auxiliaries, much like English “is”, “has”, “will”, etc. We’ve already seen the future tense nos, but there are a few more that we can introduce.
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an: A negative marker similar to English “no”: an coto “he does not walk”.
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cal: A mood marker like “should”: cal coto “he should walk”. (Unlike English, Isian can directly use this with the past tense: cal cotos “he should have walked”.)
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mor: Mood marker that indicates the ability to act: mor coto “he can walk”. (In the past tense, it’s more like “could”.)
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sum: Indicates a possibility, like “might”: sum coto “he might walk”.
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ish: Like sum, except that implies “probably not”: ish coto “he might walk (but he likely won’t)”.
Two particular auxiliaries deserve more than a bullet point. First is ade, which actually functions as its own verb, inflecting for person just like any other, but its tenses have different meanings. In the present tense, it marks an “ongoing” aspect, like the English participle: ade coto “he is walking”. (The main verb, of course, can be in any tense: ade cotos “he was walking”, and so on.)
Put ade in the past tense, and it marks the completion of an action: ades coto “he stops walking”. Again, the main verb can change tenses independently.
Using ade in the perfect creates a “past perfect”: adec coto “he had walked”. Here, it doesn’t really matter whether the main verb is in the present, past, or perfect. The meaning is the same.
The other peculiar auxiliary verb in Isian is par, which marks the passive voice. Passives are complex in many languages, but they’re not that hard to figure out here. We can’t use coto here, because it’s intransitive, and you can’t really make intransitive verbs passive, so we’ll use our other example, hama. An active sentence might be hamata e tema “I ate the food”.
To put this in the passive voice, we do three things. First, the old object becomes the subject; the old subject can be ignored or put in as a prepositional phrase, but we haven’t discussed those yet. Second, we add par before the verb. Finally, we change the verb’s conjugation to match its new subject (the former object). Put all this together, and we get the new sentence tema par hamas “the food was eaten”.
Irregular Verbs
Isian does have a few genuinely irregular verbs. One of these, possibly the most important verb in a language, is the “copula” verb, like English’s “to be”. In Isian, it has the infinitive (or dictionary) form tet, but its conjugation looks like this:
| tet | 1st Sg. | 1st Pl. | 2nd Pers. | 3rd Pers. |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Present | en | tem | il | e |
| Past | et | eda | tel | tes |
| Perfect | tec | tec | kel | ec |
| Subjunctive | meyn | menim | med | med |
Two other, similar verbs that have irregular forms are sedel “to become” and fer “to seem, look”. For these, we have:
| sedel | 1st Sg. | 1st Pl. | 2nd Pers. | 3rd Pers. |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Present | seden | sema | sedil | sede |
| Past | sed | seda | sedel | sedes |
| Perfect | selec | selec | sedel | sec |
| Subjunctive | sidi | sidim | sid | sid |
| fer | 1st Sg. | 1st Pl. | 2nd Pers. | 3rd Pers. |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Present | fen | feter | fel | fe |
| Past | fet | feta | fil | fes |
| Perfect | fen | feter | fel | fe |
| Subjunctive | safen | safim | safed | safer |
If you were actually learning Isian as a real language, you’d probably have to memorize these. Our imaginary Isian schoolchildren would, too.
Vocabulary
Here are a few more verbs that you can play around with. All of these are perfectly regular, following the pattern laid out for chere.
- to have: fana
- to come: cosa
- to go: wasa
- to drink: jesa
- to laugh: eya
- to hold: otasi
- to hear: mawa
- to wash: hishi
- to cook: piri
- to speak: go
- to call: tede
- to read: lenira
- to write: roco
- to want: doche