Tenses I: l-form

For understanding of this article the reader needs to be familiar with the concepts stated in the previous chapter. We will also use similar convention as in the previous chapter, when stating something as 2. person singular without specifying the tense we always mean the present one.

Note also that this is a double chapter with direct follow-up.

The past tense

The usage of l-form

The past tense uses the l-form in Czech. The l-form carries information about the grammatical number (singular/plural) and the gender of the doer of the action. Note that the l-form is the only form of a verb that carries the information about the gender. The information is carried by following endings:

To show them in context we demonstrate them on the verb být - jsem - byl (to be).

Note that since in the oral speech the i and y are pronounced exactly the same and since the informal form of neuter plural is very dominant in some reagions (such as Prague) the plural form of l-form is basically the same for all the genders (at least in the Prague oral production).

Full past tense conjugation

Smart reader will notice that the information about the person is missing in the l-form, that means that this information needs to be conveyed in a different way. The answer to this issue is the auxilary verb which happens to be the verb být - jsem - byl (to be) in it's present tense. The complete past tense is showed bellow on the verb dělat - dělám - dělal (to do).

Note that for the 3. person both singular and plural the auxiliary verb is missing. This is because the third person is usually the most used variant of the past tense. When there's something in the language that is the most used variant it can often get ommited and the speakers will recognize it's presence by it's absence (I know how it sounds).

In Russian and many other languages the verb "to be" got completly ommited in the present tense. So instead of "I am student" speakers of Russian say just "I student" (we're now using pseudo russian-english). The "presence" of the verb "to be" is delivered through absence of any other verb. It works the same with the past tense, when you see l-form without any auxiliary verb, it must be 3. person.

Note that the form written in italics formally exist, but semantically they don't make a lot of sense semantically (the masculine inanimate and neuter are used mostly for object and objects usually don't speak about themselves in the 1. person singular), so they occur very rarely if ever.

Note that for 3. person we can profit from a little vowel harmony between the pronoun and the l-form, compare following:

• ona dělala
• ono dělalo
• oni dělali
• ony dělaly

The auxiliary "to be"

The verb být - jsem - byl has it's informal form in the 2. person singular (jseš) that coexists with the more formal one (jsi). However when this verb is being used as auxiliary only the jsi form is allowed even in the utmost informal setting.

The verb být - jsem - byl used as auxiliary has also it's special position in the sentence. This won't be discussed here, since it's a broader topic but to give a little bit of an introduction, it always needs to be on the second position in the sentence, unless there is some other word (or words), that also needs to be on the second position, in this case they form a strict ordering in which they all pass to the second position.

Oral speech curiosity

In Oral speech the auxiliary verb být - jsem - byl (to be) may be ommited as well in the 1. person both singular and plural. When it's ommited however the subject needs to be expressed. Look at following examples with verb jít - jdu - š(e)l (to go).

• já jsem tam šel -> já tam šel (I went there)
• my jsme tam šli -> my tam šli (We went there)

When you don't express the subject, due to the absence of the auxiliary verb, the meanings gets shifted to the 3. person, see:

• tam šel (he (unexpressed) went there)
• tam šli (they (unexpressed) went there)

Note that this happens because the subject can often be ommited very freely in Czech language.

The conditional

The conditional uses the l-form together with a different tense of the auxiliary verb být - jsem - byl. This tense no longer exists in Czech and the only artefact we have from it is it's auxiliary usage in the conditional tense. The forms of the auxiliary verb are:

We show the full conditional conjugation on example with verb chtít - chci - chtěl (to want).

We haven't showed the tables for masculine inanimate and neuter, yet they are formed analogously and most of them don't make a lot of sense semantically as for the past tense.

Also the same thing with the position