Verbs are essential to every sentence. They denote actions or states of being. In Çomyopregi, they must agree with the subject of the sentence in person and number, i.e., indicating whether the subject is I, you, he/she/it, we, you(pl.), or they. So, "I eat, you eat, he eats, we eat, you all eat, they eat" would need different verb forms in Çomyopregi: edem, edes, edet, edemo, edeti, eden. There are three other characteristics, reflected in the verb's form, which are not determined by the subject: tense, mode, and voice.
There are two voices — active and passive — and three moods — indicative, subjunctive, and imperative. The tenses are six in number: present, perfect, future, imperfect, pluperfect, and future perfect (but all six are found only in the indicative). The tenses may broadly be classified as durative (present, imperfect, and future), representing a ongoing process or repetitive action, and perfective (perfect, pluperfect, future perfect), representing a completed action or state.
The inflection of verbs in Çomyopregi is significantly more complicated than the inflection of nouns. One must know the three principal parts of the verb (first person singular present indicative active, first person singular perfect indicative active, and perfect passive participle) and the three sets of personal endings (present, perfect, and passive), as well as remember the rules for the construction of each tense, mode, and voice. The principal parts are necessary to find the verb stems: the present stem is found by removing the personal ending from the first principal part, the perfect stem by removing the ending from the second, and the participial stem by removing -o from the third. The present stem almost always ends in a vowel, the perfect and participial almost always in a consonant or y. And here are the personal endings of the verb:
| Present | Perfect | Passive | |
| ío | -m | -a | -mor |
| tú/yú | -s | -as | -sor |
| to | -t | -e | -tor |
| nós | -mo | -ame | -messa |
| uós | -ti | -ate | -dhui |
| tós | -n | -an | -ntor |
Traditionally the great variety of Çomyopregi verbs is divided into seven classes, based on the stem vowels of the verbs, which exhibit some differences of conjugation; which class a given verb belongs to can be determined from the principal parts. Although most of Class IV is transitive, most of Class V is intransitive, and most of Class VI is causative, the classes do not necessarily indicate differences of meaning among their members. (For more about transitive and intransitive verbs, see the section about voice and transitivity; for more about causative verbs, look under derivational morphology.) In the examples of conjugation below a representative of each class will be given.
The corresponding stems for each of these verbs are:
(Ey-stems are distinguishable from true é-stems by having -ey- in the perfect stem and -í in the participial stem. Also, most end in -pé- specifically.)
While most of these classes exhibit particular patterns of conjugation, it is still important to know all the principal parts of a verb to conjugate it correctly, because there is no fixed rule for deriving each stem from any other — this is particularly true of classes I and VII. The differences among stems may be a matter of suffixes, or of an internal mutation, or the stems may have little apparent relation to each other. The examples below demonstrate some of the variability:
The various moods and tenses are formed by adding the various ending sets to different stems, often after a suffix (or in the case of the subjunctive, with an accompanying mutation of the stem vowel). Examples are provided below for each verb class.
Add the present endings to the present stem.
Add -vu then the present endings to the present stem.
Add the perfect endings to the perfect stem. However, the third person singular is -ui in u-stems and simply -i in i-stems.
Add -es then the perfect endings to the perfect stem. Note that in u-stems, the resulting -ue becomes -ui, in i-stems -ye fuses to simply -i, and in ey-stems -eye becomes -é.
Add -si then the present endings to the present stem.
Add -sy then the perfect endings to the present stem. However, the third person singular does not have -sye but -si.
Add the passive endings to the present stem. Thematic sems change -e to -o, i-stems change -i to -yo, and ey-stems change -é to -eyo.
Add -vu then the passive endings to the present stem.
To the participial stem, add -é then the present endings.
To the participial stem, add -ésa then the present endings.
Add -si then the passive endings to the present stem.
To the participial stem, add -ési then the present endings.
Add the present endings to the present stem. The following changes are then made to the present stem: -e becomes -oy, -u becomes -uy, -i becomes -ío, and -é becomes -eyoy if it has -ey in the perfect stem. Stems in -á, other émstems, and root verbs insert -ye before the present endings.
Add -oy then the perfect endings to the perfect stem. The -o of the suffix is dropped in u-stems.
Add the passive endings to the present stem. The following changes are then made to the present stem: -e becomes -oy, -u becomes -uy, -i becomes -ío, and -é becomes -eyoy if it has -ey in the perfect stem. Stems in -á, other é-stems, and root verbs insert -ye before the present endings.
Add -éyé- then the present endings to the participial stem.
In the singular, it is identical to the present stem. (But ey-stems take -eye instead.) In the plural, add -ti to the present stem.
In the singular, add the third-person singular passive ending to the present stem; in the plural, add the third-person plural passive ending. Then change the final -r to -t.
Verbs. Now you know what they are and what they consist of, but what do they mean? What is their purpose? Why, why? Should you desire to know, you must follow me further down into the dark cave of syntax.
Reguándóy domum© 2005 by Damátir Ando