Hey, my Squids! Welcome back to another Abaroguian lesson. In this lesson, we’ll talk about word tenses. We touched on them briefly in the last lesson but this is where we’ll go a bit more in-depth. Since we’re three lessons in, we’ll just jump right into it!
Tense in Abaroguian is divided into past, present, and future, the same as English. Present tense is the base word, future tense adds a conjugation to the end of the word, and past tense does the same. Future tense also informs intentions, modifiers that say an action is going to happen immediately or some unspecified time in the future. There are also positive and negative tenses.
Present Tense
Present tense is the simplest verb form. An English sentence like “I go to the store” is “I go to the store” in Abaroguian. While the sentence structure may be different, the concept is the same. We saw this in the last lesson.
Past Tense
Past tense uses a modifier of “-mada” (pronounced mah-duh). You append it to the end of verbs. For instance, the verb “Go” in English is “Gir” (pronounced jee-ar) in Abaroguian. In English, the past tense would be “Went” but in Abaroguian it is “Girmada” (pronounced jee-ar-mah-duh). In this way, “I went to the store” in English is “Esatoi girmada iotaja parsa” or “I went store to).
Future Tense
There are two ways to use future tense in Abaroguian: an action you are doing immediately and an action you plan to do in the future. The difference is that a future action is modified with an Intention modifier. We will show both examples here but will go into greater detail about Intention modifiers in a future lesson.
Both examples use the tense modifier of “-es” (pronounced eh-suh) appended to the end of the verb. The base verb of “Go” in English is “Gir” in Abaroguian. The future tense in English is “Going” and in Abaroguian is “Gires” (pronounced jee-ar-eh-suh).
Whether you use an intention modifier or not will depend on the “immediacy” of the action. For example, “Going to the store now” vs “Going to the store sometime in the future”. Both will use the Future tense but one of them is intended to specify now.
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When describing an action that will happen in the immediate future, as in you are about to perform it, you will write your sentence as normal. “I’m going to the store (now)” is “Esatoi gires iotaja parsa”.
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When describing an action that will happen in the future beyond the immediate, you will add an intention modifier to the beginning of the sentence. Depending on the subject (you or someone else), you will use a different modifier. Everything else is written the same (you can drop the subject depending on the Intention modifier. A sentence like “I’m going to the store (in the future)” is “Poresa gires iotaja parsa” where “Poresa” is a positive intention modifier of the self.
Positive Tense
Positive tense verbs are the base forms of past, present, and future tense as they are all assumed to be positive.
Negative Tense
The Negative tense for verbs are formed by appending “-notta” (pronounced noh-tah) to the end of a verb. This order of conjugation comes after the Past or Future Tense variation, so “did not go” in English is “girmadanotta” where as “is not going” is “giresnotta,” with the appropriate intention indicator at the beginning of the sentence if the action is taking place sometime beyond now. In practice, people generally drop the negative tense for future tense verbs as the words “Eduorno” (pronounced eh-doh-or-noh) and “Escanotta” (pronounced ehs-kah-noh-tah) will generally act as the stand in for the “-notta” negative tense for the verb if the intention is immediate. For instance, “I’m not going to the store (in the future)” is intentionally different than “I’m not going to the store (now)” so the sentences would be “Eduorno esatoi gires iotaja parsa” and “Esatoi giresnotta iotaja parsa” respectively. In layman’s terms, if you’re saying you won’t do something in the (unspecified), you don’t need to use a verb’s future tense but if you are saying you won’t do something now, you will.
Multiples
There will be times when you will want to note that an item, object, or person is more than one. Abaroguian has a simple way of doing this, affixing a ï, pronounced ay-ee. It is the only time this letter is used in the Abaroguian language. A word like “message” which is obranou becomes obranouï for “messages”. Sometimes, however, Abaroguians will forego this entirely when the people conversing already know they’re talking about multiple versions of a thing.
I hope you enjoyed this lesson! In our next lesson, we’ll talk about Particles!