Letter Г г and Verbs

I hope that you've been studying your pronouns, because today we're going to introduce verbs.

But first, the letter of the day:

Г г

It's the Bulgarian form of the English "g."

And now...verbs.

Bulgarian verbs have three forms. They are often referred to as a-pattern, e-pattern, and i-pattern. A-pattern are the most typical and the easiest to learn, so we'll start with a-pattern verbs.

The key to understanding Bulgarian verbs is that the ending letters of the verb changes depending on the pronoun being used. These are the a-pattern endings:

When the pronoun is az, the a-pattern ending is -am
When the pronoun is ti, the a-pattern ending is -ash
When the pronoun is toi, tya, or to, the a-pattern ending is -a
When the pronoun is nie, the a-pattern ending is -ame
When the pronoun is vie, the a-pattern ending is -ate
When the pronoun is te, the a-pattern ending is -at

This probably doesn't make sense right now, but stick with me. The good news is that once you have the endings memorized, you're good to go.

Let's introduce our first verb so that we can see how these endings work. The first verb today is "to have." In the Bulgarian language, verbs are taught by the first person version of the verb, so in Bulgarian the verb "to have" is "imam."This is how the verb looks in all of its forms. The endings that I introduced above are in bold.

az imam
ti imash
toi, tya, to ima
nie imame
vie imate
te imat



Let's introduce a second verb to help show this pattern. The second verb is "to not have," which in Bulgarian is the word nyamam. This is how the verb looks in all of its forms.

az nyamam
ti nyamash
toi, tya, to nyama
nie nyamame
vie nyamate
te nyamat



Notice that the root of the word stayed the same in both cases: im and nyam. The only thing that changed here was the endings, which will always be the same for all a-pattern verbs.

I will spend time on a-pattern verbs all week to show how this makes sense.

By the way, you know have enough knowledge of the Bulgarian language to make your first sentence. If I said:

Imam brat.

What does that mean? (Hint: brat was introduced in "A dose of grammar...and some new words."