IMPERATIVE MOOD.-Singular: Be! Plural: Be! INFINITIVE MOOD.-Present Indefinite: (To) be. Present Perfect: (To) have been. PARTICIPLES.-Present: Being. Past: Been. Compound: Having been. We find the short simple form BE! in Coleridge's line "Be, rather than be called, a child of God!" (i) It is plain from the above that the verb Be is made up of fragments of three different verbs. As when, in a battle, several companies of a regiment have been severely cut up, and the fragments of those that came out safely are afterwards formed into one company, so has it been with the verb be. Hence the verb ought to be printed thus: Am was been. The m in am is the (ii) Am is a different verb from was and been. same as the m in me, and marks the first person. same as the th in thou, and marks the second person. Compare wil-t and shal-t. Is has lost the suffix th. The Germans retain this, and say ist. Are is not the O.E. plural, which was sind or sindon. The word are was introduced by the Danes. [The Danish word to this day is er, which we have learned to pronounce ar, as we do the er in clerk and Derby.] (iii) Was is the past tense of the old verb wesan, to be. In some of the dialects of England it appears as war-the German form. (iv) Be is a verb without present or past tense. (v) (a) Be is a notional or principal verb when it means to exist, as "God is." (b) It is also a principal verb when it is used as a joiner or copula, as in the sentence, "John is a teacher," where the is enables us to connect John and teacher in the mind. In such instances it is called a Copulative Verb or Copula. 36. The Auxiliary Verbs have different functions. (i) The verb Be is a Voice (and sometimes a Tense) Auxiliary. It enables us to turn the active into the passive voice, and to form the imperfect tenses. (ii) May, should, and let are Mood Auxiliaries. May and should help us to make the compound subjunctive tenses; and let is employed in the Imperative Mood to form a kind of third person. Thus Let him go is = Go he! (iii) Have, Shall, and Will, are Tense Auxiliaries. With the aid of have, we form the perfect tenses; with the help of shall and will, the future tenses. (iv) Can is a defective verb with only one mood, the Indicative, and two tenses, the Present and the Past. Could is a weak form. The 7 has no right there: it has crept in from a false analogy with should and would. Chaucer always writes coude or couthe. (v) May is also defective, having only the Indicative Mood and the Present and Past Tenses. Present. I may; thou mayest, etc. Past. I might; thou mightest, etc. The O.E. word for may was maegan. The g is still preserved in the gh of the past tense. The guttural sound indicated by g or gh has vanished from both. (vi) Must is the past tense of an old verb motan, to be able. It is used only in the Indicative Mood, sometimes in the Present, sometimes in the Past Tense; but the form is the same for both tenses. It expresses the idea of necessity. |