The Present Tense

Welcome to your SEVENTH LESSON IN VEHEVIONIAN

Now that you've learned the three main types of verbs in Vehevionian, it’s time to learn their conjugations in the present tense.

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First, let’s start by explaining what conjugating a verb means:

Conjugation is the process of altering the form of a verb depending on who’s doing the action. In English for example, conjugating a verb can look like this:

To eat —> I eat, You eat, He eats, We eat, etc.

Vehevionian follows the same idea, but has specific endings to indicate the subject doing the action.

As mentioned in previous lessons… in Vehevionian, pronouns are implied in the verb. You don’t need to write the subject pronoun in front of the verb, unlike English (ex. you eat).

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The Six Persons:

Every Vehevionian verb can be conjugated into six different forms:

I — First Person Singular
You — Second Person Singular
He/She/It/They — Third Person Singular
We — First Person Plural
You — Second Person Plural
They — Third Person Plural

Most verbs use all six of these forms regularly.

However, with verbs like “to rain” and “to snow”, only the third person singular is used. Only in rare cases like interpretive literature would there be a situation where one would say “I rain” or “you rain.”

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Regular Verb Conjugation:

To conjugate a regular verb, you keep the infinitive and add these endings for each form:

I — -s
You (sg.) — -i
He/She/It — -t
We — -wi
You (pl.) — -si
They — -nt

Here are some examples:

Prete (to have)

Pretes
Pretei
Pretet
Pretewi
Pretesi
Pretent

Maeve (to do)

Maeves
Maevei
Maevet
Maevewi
Maevesi
Maevent

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Different Irregular Verb Conjugation:

To conjugate these, you remove the final letter, ‘e’, and add:

I — -os
You (sg.) — -ai
He/She/It — -at
We — -awi
You (pl.) — -asi
They — -ont

Here are some examples:

Kavahe (to be)

Kavahos
Kavahai
Kavahat
Kavahawi
Kavahasi
Kavahont

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The Special Rule for Kavahe:

The verb ‘kavahe’ (to be) behaves differently from other verbs. When the verb is used with a pronoun (I, you, we, etc.), you conjugate it normally.

Example: Kavahos volle —> I am happy

However, when a noun takes the place of the pronoun, you don’t use the conjugated form of ‘kavahe’ to say ‘is’ or ‘are’, you use different words!

These words for ‘is’ and ‘are’ respectively are:

• Vi

• Ana

Example:

Te raoen vi volle. — The father is happy.
Te meis ana teluns. — The children are skinny.

There is no separate word for ‘am’, because there is no situation where a ‘I’ can take the place of a noun or vice versa.

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Divergent Irregular Verbs:

These verbs are conjugated by removing the final two letters and adding these endings:

I — -os
You (sg.) — -ei
He/She/It — -et
We — -ewi
You (pl.) — -esi
They — -ynt

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The Exceptions with Divergents:

Some divergent irregular verbs have an ‘o’ or ‘a’ directly before the ending -teo. An example of this is the verb “geoteo” (to create). When you have a verb like this, the verb behaves exactly like a regular verb, keeping -teo and adding the regular endings.

Example:

Geoteo (to create)

Geoteos
Geoteoi
Geoteot
Geoteowi
Geoteosi
Geoteont