Verbal Conjugation Agreement

[evmdbm]

Russian and Polish both have agreement in gender and number in the past tense. Russian: On prochital (he read), ona prochitala (she read); oni prochitali (they read). I understand that originally these were participles with an auxiliary verb and the auxiliary just got dropped. Do people know of any other examples of languages with verbal agreement by gender and number? I'm curious as to whether there are any languages which do this across the piece not just in one tense.

[mèþru]

Hebrew

[akam chinjir]

It's a bit complicated by definitions, but many Bantu languages probably count.

[mèþru]

Arabic as well, I forgot about it.

[Kuchigakatai]

Hebrew

Arabic as well, I forgot about it.

Also Berber, Hausa and Ancient Egyptian. So probably most of Afro-Asiatic.

[burke]

My Memory may be a little rusty, but doesn't Basque do this for ergative and dative arguments?

[Linguoboy]

Romance historically did this with the perfect tenses. There are vestiges still in French and Catalan (e.g. "Diu que els xicots que les han vistes s'han agradat d'elles."). Full agreement along these lines is still a feature of many Indic languages.

[xxx]

French has gender agreement in past tense (perfect)... but only in SOV construction...

[2+3 Clusivity]

Hindi and related indo-aryan languages do on the copula in the past and related TAM combos. The aspectual forms also show gender agreement. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hindustani_grammar

[mèþru]

To me the usually "SOV" construction of French is actually a single verb with polypersonal agreement.

[mèþru]

Also written French has gender for most perfect verbs using the auxiliary être.

[evmdbm]

French has gender agreement in past tense (perfect)... but only in SOV construction...

You're referring here to the participle here though aren't you, not the finite verb, which is what I'm after? I suppose that's rather like the Russian position before they ditched the auxiliary, except agreement by gender and number is with the object (not subject as in Russian). I never really thought about that as polypersonal agreement, but rather as the participle acting as an adjective - an attribute of the object (being seen, being broken whatever) rather than primarily the "compound tense" construction. I'd forgotten actually that French has agreement with the subject in the perfect tense in those few verbs that take être.

I'm pretty Indo-European in that I learnt French, German and Latin at school, but also a year of Japanese, and learnt a smattering of Russian afterwards, so thanks for all the non Indo-European examples!

[xxx]

I never really thought about that as polypersonal agreement, but rather as the participle acting as an adjective - an attribute of the object rather than primarily the "compound tense" construction.

that's right with être auxilary, that is used also in attribute construction... with avoir it's an other strange mix, a really verb with agreement as adjective but with object...

[miekko]

For the opposite - an even more restricted presence of congruence in the verb system, Swedish (and probably the other scandos) has gender congruence only in the analytic passive, where the synthetic passive lacks it, so:


bilen såldes : the car was sold
bilen blev såld : the car was sold

huset såldes: the house was sold
huset blev sålt : the house was sold

skeppen såldes: the ships were sold
skeppen blev sålda: the ships were sold