Tense: tense
| Values: | Fut | Nar | Past | Pres |
Tense shows whether the time we are talking about is before, after, or at the same time as the moment of speech (or a different, contextually salient reference time). Ruuli distinguishes between the present, past, and two future tenses.
In addition, Ruuli has the narrative prefix that is used for chaining consecutive clauses. The narrative cannot co-occur with tense or aspect marking; we treat it here as tense.
Pres: present
The present tense is unmarked.
Examples
- bakola. “they work” (the tense is unmarked)
Past: past
The past tense is realized with the prefix a- co-occurring with either the perfective aspect suffix -ire or the habitual aspect suffix -nga. Tonal contrast is used to further distinguish between recent and remote past, but they have identical morphological templates and are not distinguished here.
Examples
-
twafunire “we received”
-
baazwalanga “we used to wear”
Fut: future
Ruuli has two future tenses, distinguished by remoteness. The near future is marked with the prefix a- that co-occurs with the final vowel -a. The remote future is marked with the prefix li-.
Examples
-
baabinuka “they will have fun”
-
tulimanya “we will know”
Nar: narrative
The narrative prefix ni- is used for clause chaining when describing consecutive events.
Examples
- nimwaba nimuloba “you go and trap / you went and trapped”
Tense in other languages: [ab] [abq] [aqz] [arr] [axm] [bej] [bg] [bm] [cs] [cy] [el] [en] [es] [fi] [fr] [ga] [gn] [gub] [ha] [hu] [hy] [it] [jaa] [ka] [ky] [naq] [nmf] [oge] [pcm] [ps] [qpm] [ruc] [ru] [sah] [say] [sl] [sv] [tr] [tt] [u] [uk] [urb] [urj] [xcl] [xmf]