Learn Assyrian › Grammar

3.1 The present copula — "am / is / are"

3 · The Copula — "am / is / are" (and "was / were") · a plain-language guide to Assyrian (Sureth) grammar

Two things to notice:

1. The speaker's own gender shows up. "I am" is iven if a man says it, ivan if a woman says it. Same for "you are" — ivet to a man, ivat to a woman. Assyrian marks gender more often than English does.
2. Most forms have a -v- (iven, ivan, ivet, ivat, ivakh). The exceptions are the 3rd person (ile, ila, ina) and 2pl (itun). Spotting that -v- helps you hear the pattern.

Word order: the copula comes after the predicate

("Predicate" just means the thing you're saying about the subject — "here," "happy," "a teacher.") Unlike English "she is here," Assyrian says the equivalent of "here she-is." The copula follows the word it's describing:

It usually glues onto the previous word

In real speech the copula rarely stands alone — it attaches to the end of the word before it, and the two blend together. With lakhkha ("here") you get a smooth single word:

And then the -v- itself drops. After a word ending in a vowel the fused forms contract a second time, and this is what you will actually hear:

Notice what the contraction costs: the gender split disappears. lakhkhen is "I am here" whoever says it. So when you hear a bare -t or -n on the end of a word, that is the copula, contracted — you can't read the speaker's gender off it, and you don't have to produce it either.

You don't need to master every blend rule now — just know that ile/ila/ina… will often fuse onto the preceding word and lose their crisp edges. Recognize it by ear.

Real sentences

(Notice in "ana khditen" and "aten … -et" the copula has already fused onto the describing word — *khdita "happy" + ivan → khditen. Khan records that one as a woman speaking; a man saying it produces the same khditen, because the contraction has already eaten the gender.)*

Go deeper

More of the present copula, from Khan's texts. The code beside each is his: A is a folktale and B an account of village life, then the text and the paragraph. Chapter 9B explains it.

A question is the same sentence, said with a rise. No word changes:

"Have been" is the present copula. Where English says "have been … since", Assyrian uses the plain present:

---