139 Sentences With "preterite" | Random Sentence Generator

Ya cené. (Spanish, Latin America) [preterite] :Não, obrigado. Já jantei. (Portuguese) [preterite] :'No, thank you.

The so-called preterite-present verbs are a small group of anomalous verbs in the Germanic languages in which the present tense shows the form of the strong preterite. The preterite of the preterite- present verbs is weak. As an example, take the third-person forms of modern German können "to be able to". Kann "can, is able to" (present tense) displays the vowel change and lack of a personal ending that would otherwise mark a strong preterite.

There are four past tenses in Udmurt which use a preterite form of the main verb and a preterite form of the auxiliary verb 'to be'.

There are four past tenses in Komi which use a preterite form of the main verb and a preterite form of the auxiliary verb 'to be'.

In Germanic languages, the term "preterite" is sometimes used for the past tense.

Konn-te "could, was able to" (preterite) displays the dental suffix of the weak preterites.

In Middle English, ēode evolved into ȝede, yede, and yode. By the 15th century in southern England, wende (wend) had become synonymous with go, but its infinitive and present tense forms had ceased to be in frequent use. This was also true of the various ēode-derived preterites of go, thus a variant preterite of wend absorbed the function. After went became established as the preterite of go, wend took on a new preterite, wended.

The verb agrees in person and number with the subject of the sentence. This is true of both full verbs and auxiliaries. Two tense/aspects are morphologically distinguished, present tense and preterite. Use of the preterite is found almost exclusively with strong verbs, i.e.

The modals can and could are from Old English can(n) and cuþ, which were respectively present and preterite forms of the verb cunnan ("to be able"). The silent l in the spelling of could results from analogy with would and should. Similarly, may and might are from Old English mæg and meahte, respectively present and preterite forms of magan ("may, to be able"); shall and should are from sceal and sceolde, respectively present and preterite forms of sculan ("to owe, be obliged"); and will and would are from wille and wolde, respectively present and preterite forms of willan ("to wish, want"). The aforementioned Old English verbs cunnan, magan, sculan and willan followed the preterite-present paradigm (or in the case of willan, a similar but irregular paradigm), which explains the absence of the ending -s in the third person on the present forms can, may, shall and will.

Verbs in Middle High German are divided into two basic categories, based upon the formation of the preterite: strong and weak. Strong verbs exhibit an alternation of the stem vowel in the preterite and past participle (called apophony, vowel gradation, or, traditionally, Ablaut), while in weak verbs, the vowel generally remains the same as in the present tense, and a dental suffix (usually "-(e)t-") is attached. In addition to the strong and weak classes, there are a few minor classes of verbs: the so-called "preterite-presents", which exhibit a strong preterite-like vowel alternation in the present tense, contracted verbs, which have full forms as well as shortened versions, and anomalous verbs, which are simply irregular and do not conform to a general pattern.

This tense, rare in Romance languages and shared only with some Gascon and Aragonese (Benasque, Gistaín) dialects, seems to have existed in Catalan since at least the 13th century. The simple preterite indicative, descending from the Latin perfect indicative, is primarily used in contemporary written Catalan. Although it has been largely replaced by the periphrastic preterite in the spoken language, the simple preterite indicative is still used in dialects such as central Valencian and the Catalan spoken on Ibiza. Another difference between contemporary and Old Catalan is the shift in simple preterite indicative endings from an etymological to an analogous pattern in third- person plural: from the Old Catalan -é, -ast, -à, -am, -às, and -aren to the contemporary -í, -ares, -à, -àrem, -àreu, and -aren.

Instead, the preterite of go, went, descends from a variant of the preterite of wend, the descendant of Old English wendan and Middle English wenden. Old English wendan (modern wend) and gān (mod. go) shared semantic similarities. The similarities are evident in the sentence "I'm wending my way home", which is equivalent to "I'm going home".

In Northern English and Scots, yede was gaed, regularly formed by suffixing -ed to a variant of go. Due to the influence of the region, southern English forms constitute the standard language of England, and so went is the standard English preterite. Spencer used yede to mean go with yode as its preterite form but as dialect.

However, some nominal roots have variable gender, i.e. they may function as either masculine or feminine nouns. This distinguishes Zaza from many other Western Iranian languages that have lost this feature over time. For example, the masculine preterite participle of the verb kerdene ("to make" or "to do") is kerde; the feminine preterite-participle is kerdiye.

Augmentation of the preterite marked the later relevance or significance of a past action, and as such often, but not always, corresponds to the perfect aspect. Additionally, augmenting a preterite verb in a subordinate clause indicates the completion of an action in that clause before the action indicated by another non- subordinated preterite phrase, slightly resembling a pluperfect. This sort of augmentation may also accompany another verb in the habitual or gnomic present to describe an action preceding another within an aphorism. Since augmentation can also express potentiality, it can be used instead of the general potential verb "can, to be able to".

R.D. Fulk, A Comparative Grammar of the Early Germanic Languages, Studies in Germanic Linguistics, 3 (Amsterdam: Benjamins, 2018), , , p. 106. Even more curiously, scholars often found both and as reflexes of Proto-Indo-European ' in different forms of one and the same root, e.g. 'to turn', preterite third- person singular 'he turned', but preterite third-person plural and past participle .

The conventionally used designations preterite and perfect are used with denotations which are divergent from their usual meanings in the grammar of other languages.

A stem beginning with f plus vowel takes both, e.g., "wait", "he waited". The preterite impersonal, e.g., "one waited", neither undergoes lenition nor receives d’.

In long stem verbs however, the fell out of the preterite. Thus, while short stem verbs exhibit umlaut in all tenses, long stem verbs only do so in the present. When the German philologist Jacob Grimm first attempted to explain the phenomenon, he assumed that the lack of umlaut in the preterite resulted from the reversal of umlaut. In actuality, umlaut never occurred in the first place.

The preterite or preterit (; abbreviated ' or ') is a grammatical tense or verb form serving to denote events that took place or were completed in the past. In general, it combines the perfective aspect (event viewed as a single whole; it is not to be confused with the similarly named perfect) with the past tense, and may thus also be termed the perfective past. In grammars of particular languages the preterite is sometimes called the past historic, or (particularly in the Greek grammatical tradition) the aorist. When the term "preterite" is used in relation to specific languages it may not correspond precisely to this definition.

Elwert, 1959, p. 50 There is gutturalisation of nd and nt to e and i, but not of the preterite of strong verbs.Ziesemer, Walther. Die ostpreußischen Mundarten.

What does a writer do when he has already won the Man Booker Prize and can make copacetic use of words like preterite, spalpeen, goitrous and phthistic?

Semitic languages, including Hebrew and the Akkadian language, feature the preterite. It is used to describe past or present events, and contrasts with other, more temporally specific tenses.

In the older stages of the Germanic languages (Old English, Middle High German) the past tense of strong verbs also showed different ablaut grades in singular and plural. Many of the preterite-present verbs function as modal verbs (auxiliaries which are followed by a bare infinitive, without "to" in English, and which convey modality) and indeed most of the traditional modal verbs are preterite- presents. Examples are English must and shall/should, German dürfen (may), sollen (ought), mögen (like), and müssen (must). The early history of will (German wollen) is more complicated, as it goes back to an Indo-European optative mood, but the result in the modern languages is likewise a preterite- present paradigm.

I have already dined.' [present perfect] :He ido a España dos veces. (Spanish, Spain) [present perfect] :Fui a España dos veces. (Spanish, Latin America) [preterite] :Fui à Espanha duas vezes.

The weak conjugation of verbs is an innovation of Proto-Germanic (unlike the older strong verbs, the basis of which goes back to Proto-Indo-European). While primary verbs (those inherited from PIE) already had an ablaut-based perfect form that was the basis of the Germanic strong preterite, secondary verbs (those derived from other forms after the break-up of PIE) had to form a preterite otherwise, which necessitated the creation of the weak conjugation.

As in English, the perfect expresses past actions that have some link to the present. The preterite expresses past actions as being past, complete and done with. In both languages, there are dialectal variations.

Grammatical changes include the loss of the second person plural verb form, changes in verb endings, particularly in the preterite, and partial merging of the second and third conjugations.Cobos, Rubén, op. cit., pp. x-xi.

In Munsee the preterite is extremely rare, and is attested primarily in earlier material, such as the following taken from Truman Michelson's field notes (the suffix /-p/ is the realization of the preterite suffix in this form):Cited in Goddard, Ives, 1979 (a) nĕmi·lá·ne·p 'I gave it to him.' The present aspect is attested primarily in forms with a counterfactual interpretation that is equivalent in meaning to the subjunctive. In this example the verb stem is /pa·-/ 'come,' with Conjunct Order third-person suffix /-t/ and Present suffix /-sa/.Goddard, Ives, 1979, p.

Like most other Germanic languages, East Flemish differentiates between strong verbs and weak verbs. Even though there are a few strong verbs in East Flemish that are weak in Standard Dutch, the overall tendency is that East Flemish has more weak verbs. Unlike many other Germanic languages, the rules for the conjugation of the strong preterite are exactly the same as in the present tense. The weak preterite is formed by adding the suffix "-dege" ("-tege" when the stem ends in a voiceless consonant) to the verbal stem.

The German word Rückumlaut ("reverse umlaut"), sometimes known in English as "unmutation", is a term given to the vowel distinction between present and preterite forms of certain Germanic weak verbs. These verbs exhibit the dental suffix used to form the preterite of weak verbs, and also exhibit what appears to be the vowel gradation characteristic of strong verbs. Examples in English are think/thought, bring/brought, tell/told, sell/sold. The phenomenon can also be observed in some German verbs including brennen/brannte ("burn/burnt"), kennen/kannte ("know/knew"), and a handful of others.

Leiden's early preterite plural auefun (9), Exeter's late > awæfan).Richard Dance, 'The Old English Language and the Alliterative > Tradition', in A Companion to Medieval Poetry, ed. by Corinne Saunders > (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), pp. 34-50 (p. 41).

In South Saami the SN is realized by a negative auxiliary. This form is used in present tense and the preterite. The LV is presented as a connegative form. A special case is presented while creating the imperative.

There are primary verbs that date to Indo-European that took a weak conjugation because they were unable to take a perfect, including verbs that had zero grade of the root in the present and so were unable to show the ablaut distinction necessary for a strong preterite. That was the case with the verbs waurkjan 'to work, create', bugjan 'to buy', and sokjan 'to seek' (Gothic forms). Preterite-present verbs are primary verbs in which the PIE present was lost, and the perfect was given a present meaning. They needed a new past tense, which followed the weak pattern.

Spanish has a number of verb tenses used to express actions or states of being in a past time frame. The two that are "simple" in form (formed with a single word, rather than being compound verbs) are the preterite and the imperfect.

This is best shown by example: : Simple past: "I ate (the) dinner" – (using preterite) : Composite past: "I have eaten (the) dinner" – (using supine) : Past participle common: "(the) dinner is eaten" – (using past participle) : Past participle neuter: "(the) apple is eaten" – : Past participle plural: "(the) apples are eaten" – The supine form is used after ("to have"). In English this form is normally merged with the past participle, or the preterite, and this was formerly the case in Swedish, too (the choice of -it or -et being dialectal rather than grammatical); however, in modern Swedish, they are separate, since the distinction of -it being supine and -et being participial was standardised.

As noted above, should and would originated as the preterite (past tense) forms of shall and will. In some of their uses they can still be identified as past (or conditional) forms of those verbs, but they have also developed some specific meanings of their own.

A category of aspect, used in the Independent and Conjunct Orders, has been distinguished for both Munsee and Unami.Goddard, Ives, 1979, pp. 53-54 The categories distinguished are Unspecified, Preterite, and Present. The unspecified has no morphological expression, and hence is equivalent to regularly inflected forms of the verb.

In the preterite tense, a number of irregular verbs in Portuguese change the stem vowel to indicate differences between first and third person singular: fiz 'I did' vs. fez 'he did', pude 'I could' vs. pôde 'he could', fui 'I was' vs. foi 'he was', tive 'I had' vs.

The optative and imperfect have related formations. The optative is generally built by adding i onto the subjunctive stem. Tocharian B likewise forms the imperfect by adding i onto the present indicative stem, while Tocharian A has 4 separate imperfect formations: usually ā is added to the subjunctive stem, but occasionally to the indicative stem, and sometimes either ā or s is added directly onto the root. The endings differ between the two languages: Tocharian A uses present endings for the optative and preterite endings for the imperfect, while Tocharian B uses the same endings for both, which are a combination of preterite and unique endings (the latter used in the singular active).

The basic present and past tenses of the verb are called simple present (present simple) and simple past (past simple), to distinguish them from progressive or other compound forms. Thus the simple present of the above verb is write or writes, and the simple past (also called preterite) is wrote.

It is talking about a single event presented as occurring at a specific point in time (the moment John pulled back the curtain). The action starts and ends with this sentence. In Spanish, this would be in the preterite (or alternatively in the perfect, if the event has only just happened).

For example, for the preterite indicative "done", "I telling" translates to "I will tell", "I done tell" to "I have told", and "done come" to "actually arrived". This form of Indian English was used both by masters for speaking to their servants as well as by servants to speak to their masters.

The contrastive feature of (im)perfectiveness was also stabilized. The perfectivization function of prefixes and the imperfectivization function of suffixes are applied. As a consequence of this, aorist and imperfect start disappearing little by little and are replaced by the perfect (now called preterite, since it became the only past tense in Czech).

Han har rejst meget, "he has traveled a lot". Han er rejst, "he is gone", he is not here anymore. Similarly, the pluperfect is formed with havde or var: han havde købt en bil, han var gået sin vej. NB. The perfect is used in many cases where English would have a simple preterite.

In Slovene, there are four tenses: # The present tense (sedanjik), which considers events that are occurring. # The past or preterite tense (preteklik), which considers events that occurred in the past. # The pluperfect (past perfect) tense (predpreteklik), which considers events that occurred before a given event already in the past. It is rare in normal use.

Most of the supposedly "irregular" Germanic verbs belong to historical categories that are regular within their own terms. However, the suppletive verbs are irregular by any standard, and for most purposes the preterite- presents can also count as irregular. Beyond this, isolated irregularities occur in all Germanic languages in both the strong and the weak verb system.

Old Irish verbs may systematically use certain verbal prefixes to express either perfect aspect or potentiality. Such prefixes are called augments. Perfective augmentation is generally performed on the preterite indicative, creating perfect-aspect forms, while potential augmentation is often applied to subjunctive forms. Both augmentations may be done albeit less commonly on the present indicative, and rarely appear elsewhere.

' [present perfect] :Tenho pensado em pedi-la em casamento. (Portuguese) [present perfect] :'I have been thinking of asking her [direct object] to marry me.' [present perfect continuous] As this example suggests, the Portuguese present perfect is often closer in meaning to the English present perfect continuous. See also Spanish verbs: Contrasting the preterite and the perfect.

The Austrian variant avoids this potential ambiguity (bin gestanden from stehen, "to stand"; and habe gestanden from gestehen, "to confess", e.g. "der Verbrecher ist vor dem Richter gestanden und hat gestanden"). In addition, the preterite (simple past) is very rarely used in Austria, especially in the spoken language, with the exception of some modal verbs (i.e. ich sollte, ich wollte).

In Latin the PIE aorist merged with the perfect.L. R. Palmer, The Latin Language, University of Oklahoma Press, 1988, p. 8. Consequently the Latin perfect tense serves both as a true perfect (meaning, for example, I have done), and as a simple preterite, merely reporting a past event (I did). It contrasts with the imperfect, which denotes uncompleted past actions or states.

For verbs, certain grammatical aspects express boundedness. Boundedness is characteristic of perfective aspects such as the Ancient Greek aorist and the Spanish preterite. The simple past of English commonly expresses a bounded event ("I found out"), but sometimes expresses, for example, a stative ("I knew"). The perfective aspect often includes a contextual variation similar to an inchoative aspect or verb, and expresses the beginning of a state.

In Urdu and Hindi, the ergative case is marked on agents in the preterite and perfect tenses for transitive and ditransitive verbs, while in other situations agents appear in the nominative case. :laṛkā kitāb kharīdtā hai : ¹ :"The boy buys a book." :laṛke ne kitāb kharīdī : ¹ :"The boy bought a book." ::(¹) The grammatical analysis has been simplified to show the features relevant to the example.

The preterite and the perfect are distinguished in a similar way as the equivalent English tenses. Generally, whenever the present perfect ("I have done") is used in English, the perfect is also used in Spanish. In addition, there are cases in which English uses a simple past ("I did") but Spanish requires a perfect. In the remaining cases, both languages use a simple past.

' The preterite or perfect tense is similar in meaning to the English simple past or present perfect. It is formed using base 2. The singular often ends in -h or -c while the plural suffix is -queh. The formation of base 2, also known as the perfective stem, depends on the specific verb, but is usually shorter in form than base 1, often dropping a final vowel.

Spanish reduje ('I reduced'). Similarly, the preterite of andar is regular in Portuguese (andaste), but irregular in Spanish (anduviste, 'you went'). Meanwhile, Spanish maintains many more irregular forms in the future and conditional: saldré 'I will leave', pondré 'I will put', vendré 'I will come', diré 'I will say', etc. Portuguese has only three: farei 'I will do', direi 'I will say', trarei 'I will carry'.

A form used for centuries but never accepted normatively has an -s ending in the second person singular of the preterite or simple past. For example, lo hicistes instead of the normative lo hiciste; hablastes tú for hablaste tú. That is the only instance in which the tú form does not end in an -s in the normative language. Ladino has gone further with hablates.

In German, the pluperfect (Plusquamperfekt, Präteritumperfekt, or Vorvergangenheit, lit. pre-past) is used in much the same manner, normally in a nachdem sentence. The Plusquamperfekt is formed with the Partizip Perfekt (Partizip II) of the full lexical verb, plus the auxiliary verb haben or sein in its preterite form, depending on the full lexical verb in question. :Nachdem ich aufgestanden war, ging ich ins Badezimmer.

In standard Swedish, the pluperfect (pluskvamperfekt) is similar to pluperfect in a number of other Germanic languages, but with a slightly different word order, and is formed with the preterite form of ha (have in English), i.e. hade (had in English), plus the supine form of the main verb: När jag kom dit hade han gått hem - When I arrived there he had gone home.

In traditional Icelandic grammar, ri-sagnir (Icelandic: "ri-verbs") is a term that refes to the four verbs in the language that have a -ri suffix in the past tense as opposed to a suffix containing a dental consonant such as -d or -ð. These verbs are also the only verbs in Icelandic which inflect with the mixed conjugation (is) except for the preterite-present verbs.

In some dialects, particularly of western Germany, the phenomenon is preserved in many more forms (for example Luxembourgish stellen/gestallt, "to put", and Limburgish tèlle/talj/getaldj, "to tell, count"). The cause lies with the insertion of the semivowel between the verb stem and inflectional ending. This triggers umlaut, as explained above. In short stem verbs, the is present in both the present and preterite.

Fusional languages or inflected languages are a type of synthetic language, distinguished from agglutinative languages by their tendency to use a single inflectional morpheme to denote multiple grammatical, syntactic, or semantic features. For example, the Spanish verb comer ("to eat") has the first-person singular preterite tense form comí ('I ate'); the single suffix -í represents both the features of first-person singular agreement and preterite tense, instead of having a separate affix for each feature. Examples of fusional Indo-European languages are: Kashmiri, Sanskrit, Pashto, New Indo-Aryan languages such as Punjabi, Hindustani, Bengali; Greek (classical and modern), Latin, Italian, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Romanian, Irish, German, Faroese, Icelandic, Albanian, and all Balto-Slavic languages, except Bulgarian. Northeast Caucasian languages are weakly fusional. Another notable group of fusional languages is the Semitic languages group; however, Modern Hebrew is much more analytic than Classical Hebrew “both with nouns and with verbs”.

Colognian has indicative and conjunctive moods, and there are also imperative and energetic mood, inferential and renarrative, none of which is completely developed. The aspects of Colognian conjugation include unitary-episodic, continuous, habitual-enduring, and gnomic. In Colognian, grammatical tense can be present tense, preterite tense or past tense, simple perfect or present perfect, past perfect tense, completed past perfect tense, simple future tense, or perfect future tense.

The past participle of regular verbs is identical to the preterite (past tense) form, described in the previous section. For irregular verbs, see English irregular verbs. Some of these have different past tense and past participle forms (like sing–sang–sung); others have the same form for both (like make–made–made). In some cases the past tense is regular but the past participle is not, as with show–showed–shown.

The passé simple (, simple past, preterite, or past historic), also called the passé défini (, definite past), is the literary equivalent of the passé composé in the French language, used predominantly in formal writing (including history and literature) and formal speech. As with other preterites, it is used when the action has a definite beginning and end and has already been completed. In writing it is most often used for narration.

'Ga,' one of Old English forms of 'go' The principal parts of go are go, went, gone. In other respects, the modern English verb conjugates regularly. The irregularity of the principal parts is due to their disparate origin in definitely two and possibly three distinct Indo-European roots. Unlike every other English verb except be, the preterite (simple past tense) of go is not etymologically related to its infinitive.

In European Spanish, as well as some Andean dialects, as in English, the present perfect is normally used to talk about an action initiated and completed in the past, which is still considered relevant or influential in the present moment. In Portuguese and Latin American Spanish, the same meaning is conveyed by the simple preterite, as in the examples below: :No, gracias. Ya he cenado. (Spanish, Spain) [present perfect] :No, gracias.

In all other cases in Spanish, the stem vowel has been regularized throughout the conjugation and a new third-person ending -o adopted: hice 'I did' vs. hizo 'he did', pude 'I could' vs. pudo 'he could', etc. Portuguese verbs ending in -duzir are regular in the preterite, while their Spanish counterparts in -ducir undergo a consonant change and are stressed on the stem; thus Portuguese reduzi vs.

"was doing" or "were doing"). These are combinations of past tense with specifically continuous or progressive aspect. In German, Imperfekt formerly referred to the simply conjugated past tense (to contrast with the Perfekt or compound past form), but the term Präteritum (preterite) is now preferred, since the form does not carry any implication of imperfective aspect. "Imperfect" comes from the Latin "unfinished", because the imperfect expresses an ongoing, uncompleted action.

Both have the sense of the English "made" or "done". The grammatical gender of the preterite-participle would be determined by the grammatical gender of the noun representing the thing that was made or done. The linguistic notion of grammatical gender is distinguished from the biological and social notion of gender, although they interact closely in many languages. Both grammatical and natural gender can have linguistic effects in a given language.

Verbs do not inflect for person or number in modern standard Swedish. They inflect for the present and past tense and the imperative, subjunctive, and indicative mood. Other tenses are formed by combinations of auxiliary verbs with infinitives or a special form of the participle called the supine. In total there are six spoken active-voice forms for each verb: infinitive, imperative, present, preterite/past, supine, and past participle.

The following verbs are very irregular, and may not fit neatly into the strong-weak split. An important subset of these verbs are the preterite-present verbs, which are shared by all Germanic languages. In the present tense, they originally conjugated like the past tense of a strong verb. In Dutch, this means that they lack the -t in the third-person singular present indicative, much like their English equivalents which lack the -s.

Butler English, also known as Bearer English or Kitchen English, is a dialect of English that first developed as an occupational dialect in the years of the Madras Presidency, but that has developed over time and is now associated mainly with social class rather than occupation. It is still spoken in major metropolitan cities. The dialect of Butler English is singular. Therefore, the present participle is used for the future indicative, and the preterite.

In modern English, preterite-present verbs are identifiable by the absence of an -s suffix on the 3rd person singular present tense form. Compare, for instance, he can with he sings (pret. he sang); the present paradigm of can is thus parallel with the past tense of a strong verb. (See English modal verb.) In modern German there is also an ablaut shift between singular ich kann (I can) and plural wir können (we can).

Verbs in Old Swedish were conjugated according to person and number. There were four weak verb conjugations and six groups of strong verbs. The difference between weak and strong verbs is in the way the past tense (preterite) is formed: strong verbs form it with a vowel shift in the root of the verb, while weak verbs form it with a dental suffix (þ, d or t).Germanic languages: conjugate Old Swedish verbs. Verbix.com.

Middle High German had two numbers, singular and plural, and three persons. The language had two simple tenses: present and preterite (or "simple past"). In addition, there were also three tenses that made use of auxiliary verbs: perfect, pluperfect, and future, all much less frequently used than in the modern language. Middle High German had three moods, indicative, imperative, and subjunctive mood (used much more frequently in Middle High German than in the modern language).

The preterite is often accompanied by the prefix ō- (sometimes called the augment, or antecessive prefix). The function of this prefix is to mark that the action of the verb is complete at the time of speaking (or in a subordinate clause, at the time of the action described by the main verb). The augment is frequently absent in mythic or historical narratives. Examples: ōnicoch 'I slept,' ōtlatohqueh 'they spoke,' ōnicchīuh 'I made it.

Middle Dutch mostly retained the Old Dutch verb system. Like all Germanic languages, it distinguished strong, weak and preterite-present verbs as the three main inflectional classes. Verbs were inflected in present and past tense, and in three moods: indicative, subjunctive and imperative. The weakening of unstressed vowels affected the distinction between the indicative and subjunctive moods, which had largely been determined by the vowel of the inflectional suffix in Old Dutch.

The past perfect progressive is also known as the pluperfect progressive , the past perfect continuous, and the pluperfect continuous. It is formed by combining, in this order, the preterite of to have, the past participle of to be, and the present participle of the main verb. The past perfect progressive relates to the past perfect as the present perfect progressive relates to the present perfect. The construction It had been being written is very rarely used.

The Present Perfect is used for every past action without strong connotation on the aspect of the verb, otherwise speakers prefer Imperfect or Past Progressive tenses. Notably, Lombard does not have a Preterite. The Present Perfect is formed with the present of the verb ìga (to have) + the past participle or with the present of the verb véser + the past participle: Example from cantà(to sing), with auxiliary verb ìga: I sing.: gó cantàt II sing.

Verbs were conjugated according to three moods (indicative, subjunctive (conjunctive) and imperative), three persons, two numbers (singular and plural) and two tenses (present tense and preterite) There was a present participle, a past participle and a verbal noun that somewhat resembles the Latin gerund, but that only existed in the genitive and dative cases. An important distinction is made between strong verbs (that exhibited ablaut) and weak verbs (that didn't). Furthermore, there were also some irregular verbs.

The preterite and past participle of shit are attested as shat, shit, or shitted, depending on dialect and, sometimes, the rhythm of the sentence. In the prologue of The Canterbury Tales, shitten is used as the past participle; however this form is not used in modern English. In American English shit as a past participle is often correct, while shat is generally acceptable and shitted is uncommon and missing from the Random House and American Heritage dictionaries.

Germanic had a simple two-tense system, with forms for a present and preterite. These were inherited by Old High German, but in addition OHG developed three periphrastic tenses: the perfect, pluperfect and future. The periphrastic past tenses were formed by combining the present or preterite of an auxiliary verb (wësan, habēn) with the past participle. Initially the past participle retained its original function as an adjective and showed case and gender endings - for intransitive verbs the nominative, for transitive verbs the accusative. For example: > After thie thö argangana warun ahtu taga (Tatian, 7,1) > "When eight days had passed", literally "After that then passed (away) were > eight days" > Latin: Et postquam consummati sunt dies octo (Luke 2:21) > > phīgboum habeta sum giflanzotan (Tatian 102,2) > "someone had planted a fig tree", literally "fig-tree had certain (or > someone) planted" > Latin: arborem fici habebat quidam plantatam (Luke 13:6) In time, however, these endings fell out of use and the participle came to be seen no longer as an adjective but as part of the verb, as in Modern German.

A mention of maranatha in the Southwick Codex, a medieval text If one chooses to split the two words as (maranâ thâ), a vocative concept with an imperative verb, then it can be translated as a command to the Lord to come. On the other hand, if one decides that the two words (maran 'athâ), a possessive "Our Lord" and a perfect/preterite verb "has come," are actually more warranted, then it would be seen as a credal expression. This interpretation, "Our Lord has come," is supported by what appears to be an equivalent of this in the early credal acclamation found in the biblical books of and , "Jesus is Lord." In general, the recent interpretation has been to select the command option ("Come, Lord!"; ), changing older decisions to follow the preterite option ("Our Lord has come") as found in the ancient Aramaic Peshitta, in the Latin Clementine Vulgate, in the Greek Byzantine texts, maranatha ("O Lord, come!" in 1 Corinthians 16:22), which was part of the eucharistic dialogue of the early Church.

Newspeak's grammar is greatly simplifed compared to English. It also has two "outstanding" characteristics: Almost completely interchangeable linguistic functions between the parts of speech (any word could function as a verb, noun, adjective, or adverb), and heavy inflectional regularity in the construction of usages and of words. Inflectional regularity means that most irregular words were replaced with regular words combined with prefixes and suffixes. For example the preterite and the past participle constructions of verbs are alike, with both ending in –ed.

Excluding four common irregular verbs, the principal parts of all other English verbs are the infinitive, preterite and past participle. All forms of these English verbs can be derived from the three principal parts. Four verbs have an unpredictable 3rd person singular form and the verb to be is so irregular it has seven separate forms. Lists or recitations of principal parts in English often omit the third principal part's auxiliary verb, rendering it identical to its grammatically distinct participial form.

It is frequently translated into English with a noun or noun phrase, for example: cuīcani 'one who sings, singer,' tlahcuiloāni (from ihcuiloa 'write, paint') 'scribe,' or 'tlahtoāni' (from ihtoa 'speak') the title for the ruler of a Mexica city. Plural formation of this form is variable. It can be in -nih or -nimeh. In some cases, the plural does not use -ni at all but instead a preterite ending, as with tlahtohqueh, the plural of tlahtoāni, or tlahcuilohqueh, the plural of tlahcuiloāni.

There is no overt preterite in Unserdeutsch,Maitz and Volker 2017, pp.377. but a generalized past tense can be indicated through the use of the uninflected verb hat (“have”) alongside a highly regularized German participle form, which is constructed by the addition of the prefix ge- to the infinitive. Even verbs borrowed from English or Tok Pisin are prefixed in this way. Thus: ::Wi hat geheiraten, orait, wi hat gegeht… ::We got married, all right, (then) we went away…Maitz et al 2019, pp.12.

The combination of the past imperfect suffix with the marker -tí´ marks a past subjunctive: jɨm "to be"; jɨmɨ "may have been",; past imperfect jɨmɨp "was"; subjunctive preterite jɨmɨptí´ "if it were". Verbal negation is expressed in different ways: with the suffix -ka, which comes between the verb root and the tense, mood, and aspect markers; with certain prefixes to the verb stem; with the words yab´ , "no", dɨi´ , "refuse", îí´ , "without effect" . Negative commands have a specific marker, -kê´ . There are many compound verbs.

There are two conjugation classes of regular verbs, as illustrated below. Forms in italics are not part of the standard language. The suffixes shown change to agree with the word ending in a velarised ("broad") consonant or palatalised ("slender") consonant. The examples below verbs ending with "broad" consonants above and "slender" consonants below. Note that in the "historical" tenses (the imperfect, preterite, and conditional), a consonant-initial stem undergoes lenition (and dialectally is preceded by "do"), while a vowel-initial stem is prefixed by d’.

Old Norse has three categories of verbs (strong, weak, & present-preterite) and two categories of nouns (strong, weak). Conjugation and declension are carried out by a mix of inflection and two nonconcatenative morphological processes: umlaut, a backness-based alteration to the root vowel; and ablaut, a replacement of the root vowel, in verbs. Nouns, adjectives and pronouns are declined in four grammatical cases – nominative, accusative, genitive and dative, in singular and plural. Some pronouns (first and second person) have dual number in addition to singular and plural.

These preterite forms are also used to create possessive forms. The future tense is formed from base 3, with a suffix -z in the singular and -zqueh in the plural. Base 3 is normally the same as base 1, except for verbs whose stem ending in two vowels, in which case the second vowel is dropped, and the stem vowel is often lengthened in front of a suffix. Examples of the future: nicochiz 'I will sleep,' tlahtōzqueh 'they will speak,' nicchīhuaz 'I will make it.

One of the past participle and the preterite verb ending in Bokmål is -et. Aasen originally included these t's in his Landsmål norms, but since these are silent in the dialects, it was struck out in the first officially issued specification of Nynorsk of 1901. Examples may compare the Bokmål forms skrevet ('written', past participle) and hoppet ('jumped', both past tense and past participle), which in written Nynorsk are skrive (Landsmål skrivet) and hoppa (Landsmål hoppat). The form hoppa is also permitted in Bokmål.

The verbal morphology is less complicated than for other early-attested Indo-European languages like Ancient Greek and Sanskrit. Hittite verbs inflect according to two general conjugations (mi-conjugation and hi-conjugation), two voices (active and medio-passive), two moods (indicative mood and imperative) and two tenses (present, and preterite). Verbs have two infinitive forms, a verbal noun, a supine, and a participle. Rose (2006) lists 132 hi verbs and interprets the hi/mi oppositions as vestiges of a system of grammatical voice ("centripetal voice" vs.

The imperfect' (abbreviated ') is a verb form which combines past tense (reference to a past time) and imperfective aspect (reference to a continuing or repeated event or state). It can have meanings similar to the English "was walking" or "used to walk". It contrasts with preterite forms, which refer to a single completed event in the past. Traditionally, the imperfect of languages such as Latin and French is referred to as one of the tenses, although it actually encodes aspectual information in addition to tense (time reference).

The imperfect is constructed in a similar manner, as are the periphrastic forms of the future and conditional tenses. In the preterite, future and conditional mood tenses, there are inflected forms of all verbs, which are used in the written language. However, speech now more commonly uses the verbnoun together with an inflected form of ("do"), so "I went" can be or ("I did go"). Mi is an example of a preverbal particle; such particles are common in Welsh, though less so in the spoken language.

Hence, the Newspeak preterite of the English word steal is stealed, and that of the word think is thinked. Likewise, the past participles of swim, give, bring, speak, and take were, respectively swimmed, gived, bringed, speaked, and taked, with all irregular forms (such as swam, gave, and brought) being eliminated. The auxiliaries (including to be), pronouns, demonstratives, and relatives still inflect irregularly. They mostly follow their use in English, but the word whom and the shall and should tenses were dropped, whom being replaced by who and shall and should by will and would.

Past tense forms express circumstances existing at some time in the past, although they also have certain uses in referring to hypothetical situations (as in some conditional sentences, dependent clauses and expressions of wish). They are formed using the finite verb in its preterite (simple past) form. Certain uses of the past tense may be referred to as subjunctives; however the only distinction in verb conjugation between the past indicative and past subjunctive is the possible use of were in the subjunctive in place of was. For details see English subjunctive.

The past perfect is also known as the pluperfect; it is formed by combining the preterite of to have with the past participle of the main verb: The past perfect is used when the action occurred in the past before another action in the past. It is used when speaking of the past to indicate the relative time of two past actions, one occurring before the other; i.e. a "past before the past". The past time of perspective could be stated explicitly: :He had already left when we arrived.

There are few irregular verbs for these tenses (only dizer, fazer, trazer, and their compounds – also haver, ter, ser, ir, pôr, estar, etc. – for the subjunctive future imperfect). The indicative future imperfect, conditional, and subjunctive future imperfect are formed by adding to the infinitive of the verb the indicative present inflections of the auxiliary verb haver (dropping the h and av), the 2nd/3rd conjugation endings of the preterite, imperfect, and the personal infinitive endings, respectively. Thus, for the majority of verbs, the simple personal infinitive coincides with subjunctive future.

The syntax of the Welsh language has much in common with the syntax of other Insular Celtic languages. It is, for example, heavily right-branching (including a verb–subject–object word order), and the verb for be (in Welsh, bod) is crucial to constructing many different types of clauses. Any verb may be inflected for three tenses (preterite, future, and unreality), and a range of additional tenses are constructed with auxiliary verbs and particles. Welsh lacks true subordinating conjunctions, and instead relies on special verb forms and preverbal particles to create subordinate clauses.

The modal auxiliaries cemented their distinctive syntactical characteristics during the Early Modern period. Thus, the use of modals without an infinitive became rare (as in "I must to Coventry"; "I'll none of that"). The use of modals' present participles to indicate aspect (as in "Maeyinge suffer no more the loue & deathe of Aurelio" from 1556), and of their preterite forms to indicate tense (as in "he follow'd Horace so very close, that of necessity he must fall with him") also became uncommon. Some verbs ceased to function as modals during the Early Modern period.

The longest palindromic word in the Oxford English Dictionary is the onomatopoeic tattarrattat, coined by James Joyce in Ulysses (1922) for a knock on the door. The Guinness Book of Records gives the title to detartrated, the preterite and past participle of detartrate, a chemical term meaning to remove tartrates. Rotavator, a trademarked name for an agricultural machine, is often listed in dictionaries. The term redivider is used by some writers, but appears to be an invented or derived term—only redivide and redivision appear in the Shorter Oxford Dictionary.

Verbs constitute one of the main parts of speech (word classes) in the English language. Like other types of words in the language, English verbs are not heavily inflected. Most combinations of tense, aspect, mood and voice are expressed periphrastically, using constructions with auxiliary verbs. Generally, the only inflected forms of an English verb are a third person singular present tense form ending in -s, a past tense (also called preterite), a past participle (which may be the same as the past tense), and a form ending in -ing that serves as a present participle and gerund.

The past tense, or preterite, may be formed regularly or irregularly. With regular verbs, the past tense is formed (in terms of spelling) by adding -ed to the base form (play → played). Normal rules for adding suffixes beginning with a vowel apply: If the base form ends in e then only d is added (like → liked); if the base form ends in a consonant followed by y then the y is changed to i before adding the ending (try → tried; an exception is the verb sky (a ball), which can form skied or skyed). Various rules apply for doubling final consonants.

The preterite forms of modals are used in counterfactual conditional sentences, in the apodosis (then-clause). The modal would (sometimes should as a first-person alternative) is used to produce the conditional construction which is typically used in clauses of this type: If you loved me, you would support me. It can be replaced by could (meaning "would be able to") and might (meaning "would possibly") as appropriate. When the clause has past time reference, the construction with the modal plus perfect infinitive (see above) is used: If they (had) wanted to do it, they would (could/might) have done it by now.

It is spoken in the non-Székely parts of Transylvania, a region of Romania formerly belonging to Hungary. Its characteristics is the pronunciation of a instead of standard o (bagár instead of standard bogár), and á instead of a. In several parts of the region the vowels are shortened (házbol instead of házból). Interestingly, it retains the preterite tense, the use of which has been steadily declining in other dialects since the Middle Hungarian period; in standard Hungarian its last appearance was in literary texts of the second half of the 19th century, and has been obsolete since then.

The simple past, past simple or past indefinite, sometimes called the preterite, is the basic form of the past tense in Modern English. It is used principally to describe events in the past, although it also has some other uses. Regular English verbs form the simple past in -ed; however, there are a few hundred irregular verbs with different forms. The term "simple" is used to distinguish the syntactical construction whose basic form uses the plain past tense alone, from other past tense constructions which use auxiliaries in combination with participles, such as the past perfect and past progressive.

Although quite common in older Sanskrit, the aorist is comparatively infrequent in much of classical Sanskrit, occurring, for example, 66 times in the first book of the Rāmāyaṇa, 8 times in the Hitopadeśa, 6 times in the Bhagavad-Gītā, and 6 times in the story of Śakuntalā in the Mahābhārata. In the later language, the aorist indicative had the value of a preterite, while in the older language it was closer in sense to the perfect. The aorist was also used with the ancient injunctive mood, particularly in prohibitions.T. Burrow, The Sanskrit Language, Motilal Banarsidass Publ.

' The preterite also can be used to create agentive constructions The pluperfect is also formed with the use of base 2 and the augment, but with the suffix -ca in the singular and -cah in the plural. The pluperfect roughly corresponds with the English past perfect, although more precisely it indicates that a particular action or state was in effect in the past but that it has been undone or reversed at the time of speaking. Examples: ōnicochca 'I had slept,' ōtlatohcah 'they had spoken,' ōnicchīuhca 'I had made it.' The imperfect is similar in meaning to the imperfect in the Romance languages.

' The final mood is sometimes called as vetitive (that is, issuing a prohibition), or negative imperative (equivalent to English 'don't...') but this is not the proper sense. Another way to describe it is admonitive - issuing a warning that something may come to pass, which the speaker does not desire, and by implication steps should be taken to avoid this (compare the English conjunction lest). The negative of this mood simply warns that something may not happen and this non-occurrence is not desirable. The mood is formed with base 2, the same as the preterite, but with different endings.

In Proto-Germanic, this process seemed to have been largely completed, with only a few relic formations such as j-presents and n-infix presents remaining as "irregular" verbs. However, a clear distinction was still maintained between primary and secondary verbs, since the lack of multiple aspect stems in the latter eventually led to the creation of the weak verbs, with most of the original primary verbs becoming strong verbs. A small minority of statives retained their perfect/stative inflection, becoming the preterite-present verbs. # Gradual reduction in the number of conjugational classes, as well as the number of productive classes.

Destinos uses the telenovela (Spanish soap opera) format to teach Spanish-language communication and comprehension skills. Early episodes have English-language narration in addition to the Spanish-language dialogue, but the English language content decreases continually, eventually disappearing entirely. The viewer is introduced to various accents and dialects and the cultures of various Spanish-speaking countries. The series consists of 52 videos that cover virtually the entire scope of Spanish grammar, including verb tenses of present, future (including future of uncertainty), imperfect, preterite, perfect, pluperfect, participles, and the present, imperfect, and perfect forms of the subjunctive.

As already mentioned here, the intervocalic s is always voiced, and the use of the preterite is also frequent instead of the use of the present perfect. In continental southern Italy, from Rome down to Calabria, possessive pronouns often are placed after the noun: for example il libro mio instead of il mio libro ("my book"). Another characteristic of regional Italian varieties in central and southern Italy is deaffrication of /tʃ/ between vowels, both word-internally and across word boundaries. In almost all peninsular Italy from Tuscany to Sicily luce is pronounced rather than , la cena is pronounced instead of as it is pronounced in northern Italy and in standard Italian.

The past "speaks" especially to David, "a child of close observation" (chapter 2); the title of this chapter is: "I observe", and as an adult he is endowed with a remarkable memory. So much so that the story of his childhood is realized so concretely that the narrator, like the reader, sometimes forgets that it is a lived past and not a present that is given to see. The past tense verb is often the preterite for the narrative, and the sentences are often short independent propositions, each one stating a fact. Admittedly, the adult narrator intervenes to qualify or provide an explanation, without, however, taking precedence over the child's vision.

The verb be has two past tense forms: was (first and third person singular) and were (plural and second person). The past tense (preterite) form is used in what is called the simple past, in sentences such as We lit the fire and He liked to dance. One of the uses of this tense is to refer not to a past situation, but to a hypothetical (present or future) situation in a dependent clause: If I knew that, I wouldn't have to ask. This is sometimes called the "past subjunctive", particularly in the case of were, which can replace was in such sentences; see English subjunctive.

The simple past or past simple, sometimes also called the preterite, consists of the bare past tense of the verb (ending in -ed for regular verbs, and formed in various ways for irregular ones – see English verbs for details). In most questions (and other situations requiring inversion), when negated, and in certain emphatic statements, a periphrastic construction consisting of did and the bare infinitive of the main verb is generally used instead – see do- support. The simple past is used for a single event in the past, for past habitual action, or for a past state: ::He took the money and ran. ::I visited them every day for a year.

The book starts in the preterite, "Oeroeg was my friend", and in reverse chronological order tells how the narrator came to that conclusion. The narrator grows up the child of a white Dutch family on Java, with Oeroeg, a native young man; as high-school students they live together in a boarding house. One crucial event is the death of Oeroeg's father, who died while saving the narrator from drowning. During World War II the narrator joins the Dutch army, and when he returns to Java finds that the world has changed: Indonesian nationalists have declared independence, and no longer accept the colonial overlord.

The Catalan verb system has grammatical categories similar to those of neighbouring Romance languages such as Spanish, Occitan, French, and Italian. The formal similarities with Occitan are most noticeable. There is a visible divergence between Catalan and Occitan in Catalan second-person plural endings: -au, -eu, -iu, instead of the Occitan -atz, -etz, -itz. One feature of Catalan is the periphrastic preterite tense for referring to the remote past, which is constructed with characteristic present-tense forms of the verb anar (to go) and the infinitive of a verb (vaig parlar, vas/vares parlar, va parlar, vam/vàrem parlar, vau/vàreu parlar, van/varen parlar).

Despite their antiquity, Anatolian morphology is considerably simpler than other early Indo-European (IE) languages. The verbal system distinguishes only two tenses (present-future and preterite), two voices (active and mediopassive), and two moods (indicative and imperative), lacking the subjunctive and optative moods found in other old IE languages like Tocharian, Sanskrit, and Ancient Greek. Anatolian verbs are also typically divided into two conjugations: the mi conjugation and ḫi conjugation, named for their first-person singular present indicative suffix in Hittite. While the mi conjugation has clear cognates outside of Anatolia, the ḫi conjugation is distinctive and appears to be derived from a reduplicated or intensive form in PIE.

In many dialects, the accents take on a significant role in marking grammatical categories. Thus, the ending (T1)—en implies determinate form of a masculine monosyllabic noun ( 'boat', , 'car'), whereas (T2)-en denotes either determinate form of a masculine bisyllabic noun or an adjectivised noun/verb ( 'mature'). Similarly, the ending (T1)—a denotes feminine singular determinate monosyllabic nouns ( 'book', 'root') or neuter plural determinate nouns ( 'houses', 'lights'), whereas the ending (T2)—a denotes the preterite of weak verbs ( 'made a mess', 'housed'), and feminine singular determinate bisyllabic nouns ( 'bucket', 'square'). In Eastern Norwegian the tone difference may also be applied to groups of words, with different meaning as a result.

In standard English, the formation of preterite and past participle forms of verbs by means of ablaut (as Germanic strong verbs, for example, sing-sang-sung) is no longer considered productive. Newly coined verbs in English overwhelmingly use the 'weak' (regular) ending -ed for the past tense and past participle (for example, spammed, e-mailed). Similarly, the only clearly productive plural ending is -(e)s; it is found on the vast majority of English count nouns and is used to form the plurals of neologisms, such as FAQs and Muggles. The ending -en, on the other hand, is no longer productive, being found only in oxen, children, and the now-rare brethren (as a plural of brother).

Aspect is as basic to the Neo-Mandaic verbal system as tense; the inflected forms derived from the participle are imperfective, and as such indicate habitual actions, progressive or inchoative actions, and actions in the future from a past or present perspective. The perfective forms are not only preterite but also resultative-stative, which is most apparent from the verbs relating to a change of state, e.g. mextat eštɔ ‘she is dead now,’ using the perfective of meṯ ~ moṯ (mɔyeṯ) ‘to die.’ The indicative is used to make assertions or declarations about situations which the speaker holds to have happened (or, conversely, have not happened), or positions which he maintains to be true.

All verbs ending in -uir (e.g. construir, disminuir, distribuir) add a medial -y- before all endings not starting with i: construyo, construyes, construya... Taking into account that these verbs also undergo the change of unstressed intervocalic i to y (see orthographic changes above), they have many forms containing y. This also applies to the forms of oír and desoír that do not undergo the -ig- change: oyes, oye, oyen Again, note that some regular forms of fluir, fruir and huir are written without stress mark if considered monosyllabic, but may bear it if pronounced as bisyllabic: vosotros huis or huís (present), yo hui or huí (preterite). Note that logically argüir loses the diaeresis before y: arguyo, arguyó (gü-gu, -güir)...

Because these old forms can sound incorrect to modern ears, regularization can wear away at them until they are no longer used: brethren has now been replaced with the more regular-sounding brothers except when talking about religious orders. It appears that many strong verbs were completely lost during the transition from Old English to Middle English, possibly because they sounded archaic or were simply no longer truly understood. In both cases, however, occasional exceptions have occurred. A false analogy with other verbs caused dug to become thought of as the 'correct' preterite and past participle form of dig (the conservative King James Bible preferred digged in 1611) and more recent examples, like snuck from sneak and dove from dive, have similarly become popular.

Modern analyses view the perfect constructions of these languages as combining elements of grammatical tense (such as time reference) and grammatical aspect. The Greek perfect tense is contrasted with the aorist and the imperfect tenses and specifically refers to completed events with present consequences; its meaning is thus similar to that of the English construction, "have/has (done something)". The Latin perfect tense is contrasted only with the imperfect tense (used for past incomplete actions or states) and is thus used to mean both "have/has done something" and "did something" (the preterite use). Other related forms are the pluperfect, denoting an event prior to a past time of reference, and the future perfect, for an event prior to a future time of reference.

For example, both languages show significant innovations in the present active indicative endings but in radically different ways, so that only the second-person singular ending is directly cognate between the two languages, and in most cases neither variant is directly cognate with the corresponding Proto-Indo- European (PIE) form. The agglutinative secondary case endings in the two languages likewise stem from different sources, showing parallel development of the secondary case system after the Proto-Tocharian period. Likewise, some of the verb classes show independent origins, e.g. the class II preterite, which uses reduplication in Tocharian A (possibly from the reduplicated aorist) but long PIE ē in Tocharian B (possibly from the long-vowel perfect found in Latin lēgī, fēcī, etc.).

It is widely accepted among researchers in the universal grammar framework that all first-language learners have access to universal grammar; this is not the case for second-language learners, however, and much research in the context of second-language acquisition has focused on what level of access learners may have. there is ongoing debate among generative linguists surrounding whether L2-users have full or partial access to universal grammar. This can be seen through acceptability judgment tests. For example, one study found that during a comprehension task, while English L1 speakers learning Spanish may accept the imperfect aspect in appropriate conditions, even at higher levels of proficiency, they do not reject the use of the Preterite tense in continuous and habitual contexts.

Cambridge University Press English aspectual distinctions in the past tense include "I went, I used to go, I was going, I had gone"; in the present tense "I lose, I am losing, I have lost, I have been losing, I am going to lose"; and with the future modal "I will see, I will be seeing, I will have seen, I am going to see". What distinguishes these aspects within each tense is not (necessarily) when the event occurs, but how the time in which it occurs is viewed: as complete, ongoing, consequential, planned, etc. In most dialects of Ancient Greek, aspect is indicated uniquely by verbal morphology. For example, the very frequently used aorist, though a functional preterite in the indicative mood, conveys historic or 'immediate' aspect in the subjunctive and optative.

The verb to pluto (preterite and past participle: plutoed) was coined in the aftermath of the 2006 IAU decision. In January 2007, the American Dialect Society chose plutoed as its 2006 Word of the Year, defining to pluto as "to demote or devalue someone or something, as happened to the former planet Pluto when the General Assembly of the International Astronomical Union decided Pluto no longer met its definition of a planet." Society president Cleveland Evans stated the reason for the organization's selection of plutoed: "Our members believe the great emotional reaction of the public to the demotion of Pluto shows the importance of Pluto as a name. We may no longer believe in the Roman god Pluto, but we still have a sense of connection with the former planet".

The preterite (past) forms given above (could, might, should and would, corresponding to can, may, shall and will, respectively) do not always simply modify the meaning of the modal to give it past time reference. The only one regularly used as an ordinary past tense is could, when referring to ability: I could swim may serve as a past form of I can swim. All the preterites are used as past equivalents for the corresponding present modals in indirect speech and similar clauses requiring the rules of sequence of tenses to be applied. For example, in 1960 it might have been said that People think that we will all be driving hovercars by the year 2000, whereas at a later date it might be reported that In 1960, people thought we would all be driving hovercars by the year 2000.

When Martin Luther translated the Bible (the New Testament in 1522 and the Old Testament, published in parts and completed in 1534) he based his translation mainly on this already developed language, which was the most widely understood language at this time. This language was based on Eastern Upper and Eastern Central German dialects and preserved much of the grammatical system of Middle High German (unlike the spoken German dialects in Central and Upper Germany that at that time had already begun to lose the genitive case and the preterite). In the beginning, copies of the Bible had a long list for each region, which translated words unknown in the region into the regional dialect. Roman Catholics rejected Luther's translation at first and tried to create their own Catholic standard (gemeines Deutsch) — which, however, differed from 'Protestant German' only in some minor details.

For archaic forms, see the next section. English has a number of modal verbs which generally do not inflect (most of them are surviving preterite-present verbs), and so have only a single form, used as a finite verb with subjects of all persons and numbers. These verbs are can, could, may, might, shall, should, will, would, must, ought (to), as well as need and dare (when used with a bare infinitive), and in some analyses used (to) and had better. (The forms could, might, should and would are considered to be the past tenses of can, may, shall and will respectively, although they are not always used as such.) These verbs do not have infinitive, imperative or participle forms, although in some cases there exists a synonymous phrase that can be used to produce such forms, such as be able to in the case of can and could.

Every Spanish verb belongs to one of three form classes, characterized by the infinitive ending: -ar, -er, or -ir—sometimes called the first, second, and third conjugations, respectively. A Spanish verb has nine indicative tenses with more-or-less direct English equivalents: the present tense ('I walk'), the preterite ('I walked'), the imperfect ('I was walking' or 'I used to walk'), the present perfect ('I have walked'), the past perfect — also called the pluperfect ('I had walked'), the future ('I will walk'), the future perfect ('I will have walked'), the conditional simple ('I would walk') and the conditional perfect ('I would have walked'). In most dialects, each tense has six potential forms, varying for first, second, or third person and for singular or plural number. In the second person, Spanish maintains the so-called "T–V distinction" between familiar and formal modes of address.

In Genoa and Bologna for example the names Mattèo, Irène, Emanuèle and the name of the city itself are pronounced with the closed e; Moreover, there is no difference in the pronunciation of the word pesca either to mean "peach" (standard ) and "fishing" (standard ). A characteristic of the North in opposition to the South is the almost always voiced () consonant in intervocalic position, whereas in the south it is always voiceless: vs. . Also in opposition to the south, the north is characterized by the reduction of phonosyntactic doubling at the beginning of the word (after vowels) and the almost total abandonment of the preterite tense in verb forms as it is not present in the majority of Gallo-italic languages (they are replaced by the present perfect). Widespread use of determiners before feminine names (la Giulia) is also noted in almost all the north while the determiner coupled with male names (il Carlo) is typical of the Po Valley.

'Aorist (; abbreviated ') verb forms usually express perfective aspect and refer to past events, similar to a preterite. Ancient Greek grammar had the aorist form, and the grammars of other Indo-European languages and languages influenced by the Indo-European grammatical tradition, such as Middle Persian, Sanskrit, Armenian, the South Slavic languages, and Georgian, also have forms referred to as aorist. The word comes from Ancient Greek ἀόριστος aóristos "indefinite", as the aorist was the unmarked (default) form of the verb, and thus did not have the implications of the imperfective aspect, which referred to an ongoing or repeated situation, or the perfect, which referred to a situation with a continuing relevance; instead it described an action "pure and simple". This does not mean, however, that the aorist was aspectually neutral, see Because the aorist was the unmarked aspect in Ancient Greek, the term is sometimes applied to unmarked verb forms in other languages, such as the habitual aspect in Turkish.

Pound continued her studies at the University of Chicago and the University of Heidelberg, earning her PhD in philological studies in 1900. By then, she had authored "The Romaunt of the Rose: Additional Evidence that it is Chaucer's" (1896)—an essay on Chaucer's role in the English translation of Le roman de la rose—had read her paper "English Pronunciation in Shakespeare's Time" at a gathering of graduate students, and presented her paper "The Relation of the Finnsburg Fragment to the Finn Episode in Beowulf" at the fourth session of the Central Division of the Modern Language Association. During her philological studies at the University of Chicago she also published "A List of Strong Verbs and Preterite Present Verbs in Anglo-Saxon" through the University of Chicago Press, an educational pamphlet meant to be used in her courses at the University of Nebraska. Pound completed her PhD at Heidelberg within a year, graduating magna cum laude.