Learn Assyrian › Grammar

4.10–4.13 Weak verbs — when a root letter goes quiet

4 · Verbs — how the system works · a plain-language guide to Assyrian (Sureth) grammar

Khan spends about eighty pages here, sorting verbs by which slot of the root holds a "weak" letter. This is the speaker's version of it.

Everything so far assumed a root of three solid consonants: p-t-kh gives patekh / ptekhle / ptukh, no surprises. But a great many everyday verbs have a weak radical — a slot in the root filled by nothing at all, or by a y or a v, letters that dissolve into the vowels around them. Those verbs look like they are breaking the rules. They aren't: the pattern is running exactly as before, over a root letter you cannot hear.

The single most useful thing to know is that the surprise is predictable from where the weak letter sits. You can read that off the citation form:

Learn the three shapes below and most of Khan's eighty pages stops being surprising.

1 · Verbs that start with a- — the a- is scaffolding

The a- at the front of akhel, azel, aved is not part of the root. It is propped there because an Assyrian syllable cannot start with a bare vowel. The moment an ending or a prefix gives the word something else to start with, the a- is gone:

This is why the past of "eat" looks like a different verb from the present. It isn't — khelle is akhel with the scaffolding taken away.

Two knock-on effects worth knowing:

• After ki- and bet- the a- often goes too, which is where those contracted futures in The tense particles come from: bet-azen → t-azen "I shall go," ki-ate → k-ate "he comes."
• After la / le in fast speech it can drop as well: le-arek ~ le-rek "he won't run away."

2 · Verbs with ay or av in the middle — the middle letter melts

Here the y or v is a real root letter, and what happens to it depends on what lands next to it. The "she" form is where you see it most clearly: middle y comes out as e, middle v comes out as o. In the past the y melts the same way (kayem → kemle) but the v survives as a consonant, squeezed into the cluster (zaven → zvenle).

The o in zona, losha, doka, gora catches everybody once — it looks like a whole new stem and it is just a + v. The same thing happens to the a- verbs whose second letter is a v: aved "do" → oda "she does," aver "enter" → ora "she enters," ave "become" → oya "she becomes."

3 · Verbs that end in -e — the biggest group, and the most regular

khaze "see," shate "drink," tane "say," bakhe "weep," male "fill," mate "arrive," bane "build," kape "gather," mane "count" — the list runs to well over a hundred. The last root letter is a y, and the whole class behaves the same way:

Two details that are otherwise baffling:

• "He" and "they" fall together once anything is stacked on the end. dare "he pours" gives dariva for both "he used to pour" and "they used to pour"; put an object on it and khazile is both "he sees him" and "they see him." Context does the work.
• The plural imperative takes -mun, not -un. That extra m is why "tell me!" is tani but "tell me, all of you!" is tanimun.

4 · Roots ending in -r or -n

Not a weak root at all, but it belongs here because it produces the same "that isn't the ending I expected" feeling. See the sound note in Past tense: after -r the -l of a past ending is always swallowed (shuderre "he sent"), after -n it optionally is (kpenle ~ kpenne "he got hungry").

Weak verbs in use

Every form here is one you have already met in the tables above — this is what they look like doing a job:

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