Los afijos temporales vascos

Abstract

Originally, the Basque language only had two verb tenses, the present and the past. These were indicated by the infixes -a- and -e-, respectively. The infix -a- comes from the old Basque adverb *da = ‘now’, but only in the nominative 3rd person. The infix -e- does not come from substantives, but has its origin in the past and was later used to form some substantives. This is because the nominative and ergative 3rd person singular of the past was used as infinitive and not the other way round. The infix -n- was later added to the 1st and 2nd person inflections of the primitive past and, afterwards, the suffix -n was added to all the inflections. In order to distinguish it from the infinitive, the suffix -n was added again, this time with an epenthetic consonant, only to the nor structure and on the 3rd person singular nominative structure of transitive verbs, the first -n suffix disappearing between vowels. The Verbal Morphological Structure of all the other Basque verb tenses was formed from the primitive VMS of the present and the past by adding other modal affixes.