Perfective aspect in the context of "French verbs"

Fusional languages or inflected languages are a type of synthetic language, distinguished from agglutinative languages by their tendency to use single inflectional morphemes to denote multiple grammatical, syntactic, or semantic features.

For example, the Spanish verb comer ("to eat") has the active first-person singular indicative preterite tense form comí ("I ate") where just one suffix, -í, denotes the intersection of the active voice, the first person, the singular number, the indicative mood, and preterite (which is the combination of the past tense and perfective aspect), instead of having a separate affix for each feature.

In linguistics, aspect is a grammatical category that expresses how a verbal action, event, or state, extends over time. For instance, perfective aspect is used in referring to an event conceived as bounded and only once occurring, without reference to any flow of time during the event ("I helped him"). Imperfective aspect is used for situations conceived as existing continuously or habitually as time flows ("I was helping him"; "I used to help people").

Further distinctions can be made, for example, to distinguish states and ongoing actions (continuous and progressive aspects) from repetitive actions (habitual aspect).

The preterite or preterit (/ˈprɛtərɪt/ PRET-ər-it; abbreviated PRET or PRT) is a grammatical tense or verb form serving to denote events that took place or were completed in the past; in some languages, such as Spanish, French, and English, it is equivalent to the past simple tense. In general, it combines the perfective aspect (event viewed as a single whole; it is not to be confused with the similarly named perfect) with the past tense and may thus also be termed the perfective past. In grammars of particular languages the preterite is sometimes called the past historic, or (particularly in the Greek grammatical tradition) the aorist.When the term "preterite" is used in relation to specific languages, it may not correspond precisely to this definition. In English it can be used to refer to the past simple verb form, which sometimes (but not always) expresses perfective aspect. The case of German is similar: the Präteritum is the simple (non-compound) past tense, which does not always imply perfective aspect, and is anyway often replaced by the Perfekt (compound past) even in perfective past meanings.

Preterite may be denoted by the glossing abbreviation PRET or PRT. The word derives from the Latin praeteritum (the perfective participle of praetereo), meaning "passed by" or "past."

The imperfective (abbreviated NPFV, IPFV, or more ambiguously IMPV) is a grammatical aspect used to describe ongoing, habitual, repeated, or similar semantic roles, whether that situation occurs in the past, present, or future. Although many languages have a general imperfective, others have distinct aspects for one or more of its various roles, such as progressive, habitual, and iterative aspects. The imperfective contrasts with the perfective aspect, which is used to describe actions viewed as a complete whole.

Ngambay (also known as Sara, Sara Ngambai, Gamba, Gambaye, Gamblai and Ngambai) is one of the major languages spoken by Sara people in southwestern Chad, northeastern Cameroon and eastern Nigeria, with about a million native speakers. Ngambay is the most widely spoken of the Sara languages, and is used as a trade language between speakers of other dialects. It is spoken by the Sara Gambai people.

Ngambay has Subject–Verb–Object word order. Suffixes indicate case. There is no tense; aspect is indicated by a perfective–imperfective distinction. Modifiers follow nouns. The numeral system is decimal, but eight and nine are expressed as 10-minus-two and 10-minus-one. It is a tone language with three tones: high, mid, and low. There are loan words from both Arabic and French.