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The compound past tense

Usage

The compound past is the most commonly used Upper Sorbian past tense. In the colloquial language it may describe any past action and for some speakers it may be the only past tense ever used in conversational speech.

On the other hand, in the written literary language and in some dialects it is primarily used to describe a (recently) past action the consequences of which exist in the present. In this case it roughly corresponds to the English present perfect (for perfective verbs) or present perfect continuous (for imperfective verbs).

Compare the use of the compound past and the simple past tenses in the written literary language:

Formation

The compound past forms are made out of the present tense form of the być je to be auxiliary verb and the so-called Ł-participe.

As the auxiliary być je verb agrees with the subject in person and number and the Ł-participe agrees with the subject in number and gender, the whole form of compound past has to be agreed with the subject in all these three grammatical categories. This creates a total set of forms shown in the tables below.

čitać čita impf. to read

přinjesć přinjese perf. to bring (while walking)

The first and second person singular neuter forms are hardly ever used as the first person (speaker) and second person (addressee) apply mostly to humans and there are very few neuter nouns denoting human beings, the most frequent exceptions being dźěćo child, hólčo boy, lad and holčo girl, the latter two being somewhat marked synonyms of stylistically neutral and more frequently used masculine hólc and feminine holca respectively.