English to me seems to be a unique language. The vast majority of our verb forms are made up using auxiliary verbs. We only have 4 verb endings: -ed, -s, -ing and sometimes -(e)n. That’s all. The rest of the verb forms are made up using auxiliary verb, e.g., I had been seeing you, I will be going with you, etc. My question is simply this: Is there any other language where most of the verb forms are made up of auxiliary verbs? And if you know of any, please feel free to cite examples of this. I’d be interested to hear something like this in another language.
I should leave this to people who know what they’re talking about. Oh well.
German, for one, has - I think this is what your’re asking - similar verb forms to English:
Ich werde nach Hause gehen. -> I will go to [the] house.
German is notorious for having a syntax where the verbs are often placed at the end of the sentence - or rather, for having a syntax where the verbs placed at the end of the sentence are. Sounds very Yoda-like in English, but in German it sounds proper.
Most Indo-European languages started out synthetic, where endings were used to inflect the verb. Nearly all of them have moved varying distances towards the analytic, where auxiliary verbs carry the inflection. English is one of the IE languages that have progressed farthest toward analyticality.
Most of the Romance languages still retain analytical tenses, but have numerous constructions that have moved to analytical format. Spanish, for example, preserves a present, an imperfect, a preterite, a future, and a conditional, all constructed analytically, but also has present and imperfect progressive, perfect, pluperfect, and future perfect, and periphrastic future constructions that are analytic in nature.
Other language groups are strictly analytic in construction. I don’t believe any of the Sino-Tibetan languages (including the Burmese group) have any synthetic forms, constructing all their shades of meaning with auxiliary words. I seem to recall that many of the indigenous New World language phyla were analytic in format, though I don’t have any definitive proof or examples. Perhaps our resident philologists can be of more help here.
Heck, the German simple past tense (the preterite??) is like that:
“Ich habe dass nich gesagt.” – “I didn’t say that.” (forgive any spelling or conjugation errors; it’s been years."
Spanish depends heavily on these formation. Heck, Spanish seems more like English than German:
“Has (tu) visto el payaso?” – “Have you seen the clown?”
“El habra escrito por mañana.” – “He will have written by tomorrow.”
I don’t write Italian, French, or Portuguese, but they’re fairly easy to understand written, and it looks like they all use the same types of formations, too.
My understanding is that in languages with little or no inflections (e.g. Chinese, Thai), use of auxillaries is close to absolute.
However, the auxillary word that indicates past, present, future, etc. need not correspond to what would be a verb in English. For example, you’d have a basic word for the verb “eat”. There’s no inflection or declension, so words like “yesterday” and “before” might be added on to indicate that an action took place in the past. Note that addition of extra words to express temporal meaning may or may not be necessary depending on the context of the message/conversation.
Almost all finite verb conjugations in Hindi & Urdu, in all tenses, are made using participles with auxiliary verbs. Using the verbal stem likh- ‘to write’:
Main likh ti hun - I write. Main likh rahi hun - I am writing. Main ne yeh likha tha - I wrote it.
This last example is an example of the Hindi & Urdu ergative verb in the past tense. In the first two examples, the participial endings had to agree in feminine gender with me as the subject. They took the feminine ending -i. But in the ergative, the participle agrees in gender with the direct object, and here took the masculine ending -a. That’s the queer thing about ergativity.
These are all conjugated with various tenses of the verb ‘to be’. Other auxiliaries in Hindi & Urdu express aspects of the verb.
The parent language Sanskrit was entirely synthetic; each verb in Sanskrit is a discrete word with endings that express person, number, tense, mood, etc. Just like in Latin. But modern Indo-Aryan languages like Hindi & Urdu have lost most of the synthetic quality, and the verb took on an isolating structure, therefore compound verbs, le passé composé, etc. Same as happened with Anglo-Saxon into English, or Latin into Italian.
Almost all tenses are designated by an auxilary. The one exception is the Praetaritum (sp?) or Simple Past, which, like in English, is either a matter of inflection (he built, er baute), vowel change (he spoke, er sprach) or a total transformation of the word (he went; can’t think of a German example but there must be one). The auxilaries for all the other tenses are as follows:
Present perfect: Haben, Sein
Past perfect: hatten, waren (themselves past formations of “haben” and “sein”)
Future: werden
Future prefect: werden + haben or sein (I think. This tense is relatively rarely used, so I might be wrong).
However, German past tenses are also inflected, because the verbs change their ending (also common in English) and many take “ge” at the beginning.
Also, many English auxilaries like should, would, can, could, are expressed by “modal verbs” in German. They aren’t technically auxilaries, and they take an infinitive, but it seems like their function is largely the same as those of the auxilary equivalents in English.
Thus, to answer you question, German, like English, is heavy on the auxilaries.
Gestalt.
To make this clear, contrast these examples using dekh- ‘see’:
Larki dekhti hai ‘The girl sees.’
Larka dekhta hai ‘The boy sees’.
Larki dekhi thi ‘The girl saw’.
Larka dekha tha ‘The boy saw’.
In these examples the present and past verbal participles agree in gender with the subject: the endings are -i feminine, -a masculine. But:
Larki ne purush dekha tha ‘The girl saw the man’.
Larka ne stri dekhi thi ‘The boy saw the woman’.
When the past tense takes a direct object, ergativity comes into play. The direct object appears in the nominative case (the opposite of what you’d expect), and the participles now agree with it, instead of with the subject which is in the ergative case. That’s the reason for the gender switch. When ergativity happens in gendered languages like Hindi, the result is grammatical transgender.
