7.1.1. Voice, Mood, Tense, Person, Number

1. The inflection of the Verb is called its Conjugation.

2. Through its conjugation the Verb expresses Voice, Mood, Tense, Person and Number.

3. The Voices are two: Active and Middle or Middle-Passive.

4. The Moods can be four: Indicative and Imperative are the oldest ones, while Subjunctive and Optative, which are newer, are not common to all Europaio-derived languages.

5. The General Tenses are three, viz.:

a. The Present

b. The Past or Preterite.

c. The Future.

6. The Aspects are two:

a. For continued, not completed action, the Present.

b. For completed action or the state derived from the action, the Perfect.

NOTE 1. The Aorist, meaning the completed action, is usually reconstructed as a third IE III aspect. We don't know, however, if the Aorist ever existed as a common aspect, or if it was only -more likely- a development of the Southern Dialects. The known fact is that there was a common past formation, with different uses in the different dialects.

NOTE 2. The IE stem usually known as 'Aorist' (Imperfect in this grammar) merged with the Imperfect in Baltoslavic, and further with the Perfect in Germanic, Latin, Italic, Celtic and Tocharian. This means in practice that the 'Aorist Stem' functioned at least as Imperfect in the Northern Dialects (wether this is an innovation or not isn't relevant), and that the Aorist aspect is (and possibly was) unknown to them. For the correct systematization of the Europaio, we choose to avoid the controversy surrounding the Aorist and assign the traditional IE III 'Aorist Stem' to the Europaio Imperfect Stem, thus following tradition (maintaining that stem), following the Northern Dialects features (using it as an Imperfect) but also following a certainly old Present/Past-Stems distinction (the merging of stems being probably an innovation of the Northern Dialects), and trying to achieve unity by using the Present stem only for the Present, and the Past only for the Imperfect.

7. There are four Verbal Stems we will deal with in this grammar:

I. The Present, which gives the Present, with primary Endings.

II. The Imperfect, always Past, with secondary Endings and sometimes Addition (a mainly southern feature).  

III. The Perfect, which can be Present and Past.

IV. The Future.

8. The Persons are three: First, Second, and Third.

9. The Numbers are two: Singular and Plural, and it is the only common class with the name. It is marked very differently, though.

NOTE. The Dual, as in nouns, wether an innovation or an archaism of some IE languages, is not systematized.