Verbs in Lingala fall into two categories. Verbs that describe the state of something, and those that don’t. A verb describing the state of something is describing what it is, rather than what it is doing. In some cases a verb can be used to do both of those things.
For example, notice the following verbs that show the state of something:
kolinga | to like, want | nalingi | I want |
komona | to see | tomoni | we see |
kosepela | to enjoy | osepeli | you enjoy |
koyeba | to know | ayebi | he/she knows |
kozala | to be/exist | bazali | they are |
Notice those words describe the state of something right now. For those verbs the present tense is formed by:
PREFIX + ROOT + i
However, the vast majority of verbs in Lingala do not describe the state of something. So how can we create the present tense? In most cases we use the verb –zal– to help us do that. Look at the following examples:
kokufa | to die | nazali kokufa | I am to die (dying) |
koloba | to speak/talk | tozali koloba | we are speaking |
kopesa | to give | azali kopesa | he/she is giving |
kosala | to do/work | bozali kosala | you (plural) are working |
kotanga | to read/count | bazali kotanga | they are reading |
koteya | to teach | ezali koteya | it is teaching |
Here we are use a form of the verb –zal– along with the infinitive of the verb we are describing to create the sense of something that is happening now. So we can write this structure as:
PREFIX + zal + i ko + ROOT + a
In this way we create most present tenses forms of verbs in Lingala. For the other verbs that express state, many times they can be used in a similar way to express the idea of the verb that is the state of the object or subject while also adding the another verb as the related action. Look at this example:
nalingi kotanga
Here we use –ling– to express the idea that the person wants to do something, and the infinitive verb kotanga tells us what. So we have the idea of I want to read. There are many more ways we can use these words that express state, but we will look at them in a later lesson.