Serial verbs

Just a few chapters ago, we learnt that you can't connect sentences with conjungtions such as "and", "or", "because", "although" and so on. Instead, we would have to split them into multiple sentences.

However, similar concept to the concept we use for the relative clause, there is the concept of serial verbs that we can use describe actions that happened one after another:

These sort of sentences can be created in Tamil by using serial verbs. Adding the verbal participle -உ｢-u｣ (or -இ｢-i｣ for verbs of class 3) to the verbs root and the past tense suffix creates infinite verbs that we can use to build these concatenated sentences.

In this sentence எடுத்து｢eṭuttu｣ and சென்று｢ceṉṟu｣ are two infinite verbs followed by the finite verb படித்தேன்｢paṭittēṉ｣. The last verb படித்தேன்｢paṭittēṉ｣ tells us about the person, gender and number as well as the tense. The others are infinite and take over the same values as this last finite verb.

This also means that you can not have a single sentence in Tamil that talks in two different tenses of subjects.

is technically possible in English, however, in Tamil this would be two different sentences.

on the other hand can be formed using serial verbs.

The negated version of these serial verbs can be built by using the -ஆமல்｢-āmal｣ suffix. This will indicate that the sub clause did not happen. While the positive participle can be used to form sentences that you would usually connect with an "and" in English and can happen one after the other, the negated version will most likely talk about something that happened together with the finite verb.

In this sentence பேசாமல்｢pēcāmal｣ happened the same time as சென்றான்｢ceṉṟāṉ｣. So you would translate this to