9 - Review

Summary

Verb Conjugation in Simple Past Tense

When to use the past tense. Persian past tense is, for the most part, similar to English simple past tense.

It describes an event that was completed once in the past, for example,

(b) With the verb to be it also conveys an event, a state of being that continued to be true for some time in past, but has or may have now changed, for example,

How to Conjugate a Verb in Past Tense

To conjugate a verb in Persian means to show the subject, that is, the person or thing that did the action described by the verb.

All Persian verbs form their past tense in the same manner. To conjugate a verb in the past tense, first say the verb's past tense root, and then say the conjugational ending that corresponds to the subject, that is, the person or thing that did the action. The conjugational endings are the same ones that you have learned for the present tense, except that we do not need any ending for او , the she/he/it form in the past tense.

Let's conjugate in past tense the verb to go, whose past tense root is رَفت (raft):

As the conjugational endings reflect the subject (i.e., the person or thing that did the action of the verb), you don't need to mention the subject if that subject is a pronoun, for example,

In base (i.e., one- word) verbs the primary stress falls on the root of the verb, while in negated verbs the stress falls on the negation prefix.

Negation. To negate the verb in past tense, simply say /na/at the beginning of the verb, for example,

The negation prefix /na/is stressed and is written together with the verb as shown above. If the verb starts with a vowel آ /ã/, the negation prefix becomes /na-ee/

In order to negate a past tense verb that starts with a vowel carried by a diacritic and introduced by the symbol ا (e.g., اُفتادن، اَنداختن), drop that symbol in writing and attach the negation prefix /naee/directly to the first consonant letter of the verb.