Verbs Words that express any sort of action, state, or occurrence are called “verbs”, and there’s usually at least one in any complete sentence: Ecuista pretzelos fican mi siter!   These pretzels are making me thirsty! Mi ne habin coitisca relatos cun ecuila muliero!   I did not have sexual relations with that woman! Cuo vos façun sine liberitio?   What will you do without freedom? Mi vol drapizan mi per viluto se lo vol es sociesche acceptébila.   I would drape myself in velvet if it were socially acceptable. Vi deprendes ecuila bebotuco de via cápito, vi ripones lo sur via sororo!   You take that diaper off your head, you put it back on your sister! Past, Present, and Future Action There are three basic “tenses” available to Romániço verbs — past, present, and future — each expressing action happening at different times relative to the speaker: The Present Tense Verbs that express action one has begun but not yet completed (those in the present tense) add -an to the root: Ci ne existan coclearo.   There is no spoon. Dingo manjan elia bebo (nun).   A dingo is eating her baby (right now). Mi lecturan La nesuportébila legeritio di eser.   I’m reading The Unbearable Lightness of Being (right now, or these days). Note that the form of the verb does not change depending on who is performing it, as it does in English:
	Mi botecuman, dunche mi esan.		I shop, therefore I am.
Vi botecuman, dunche vi esan.		You shop, therefore you are.
Ili botecuman, dunche ili esan.		He shops, therefore he is.

Esan “is/am/are” can be contracted to es: Mi botecuman, dunche mi es.

The Past Tense

The Future Tense

In Romániço, the tense of the quoted material stays the same as if it were quoted directly:

While there’s nothing technically wrong with using infinitives after prepositions, it may be less jarring for some to express the same idea as an adverb instead:

English often uses the pronoun it when there’s no obvious subject for a sentence, as in “It is freezing in here” and “It would be great if you could come in on Saturday”. Romániço expresses the same idea with the pronoun id:

English “there is”, “there are”, “here is”, etc., is rendered by ci followed by eser or exister in Romániço:

except when one wants to call attention to the subject, in which case Romániço uses ecce:

In the present tense, action is often “in progress” by default, and needs no special marker:

When the unfinished nature of an action is not otherwise clear, one can use the particle sta:

Adjectives created from verbs are called “participles”. Most modern European languages, including English, recognize two kinds of participle — those expressing action currently being performed by the nouns they modify, and those expressing completed action, whether being performed by or on the nouns they modify:

In Romániço, too, there are two basic types of participle: “active” (those being performed by the nouns they modify) and “passive” (those being performed on the nouns they modify by someone or something else). However, both types come in three distinct forms — one to express completed action, one for action in progress, and one for action yet to come:

Note that, to indicate what the dingo had eaten, is eating, or will eat (the “direct object”), one uses the preposition je:

Participles as Adverbs

Participles as Nouns

Simple verbs in English and Romániço show not only when the action took place (tense), but the degree of the action’s completion (aspect). For example, the simple past tense generally shows completed action (mi scribin létero), the present tense action in progress (mi scriban létero), and the future tense action that will be completed later on (mi scribun létero). With compound verbs, one can express any degree of completion in any tense:

Note that eser followed by a participle expresses a pre-existing state in Romániço, just as it would if followed by any other adjective. To say, for example, la dingo esin manginta ye 3:00 means that the dingo had finished eating at or before 3:00. To indicate that the dingo finished at 3:00 and not before, use fier (“to be rendered”) instead of eser:

Compound tenses are much more common in English than in Romániço, which generally uses them only to underscore the time and completeness of one action in relation to another (manger and envader in the previous example) or to emphasize the agent of a passive action (dingo in manjata da dingo). Otherwise, where English uses a compound verb, Romániço uses a simple one.

When a person or thing directs action toward another person or thing, the action is said to be “transitive” (i.e., it transits its action onto something else). For example, pay (a fee), watch (a movie), say (the truth). The person or thing being acted on (in the previous examples, fee, movie, and truth) is called the “direct object”.

When the action is not directed toward something else, like be, sit, and recline, it is said to be “intransitive”.

In English, many verbs are both transitive and intransitive, depending on the context:

In Romániço, a verb is either transitive or intransitive, never both. To make an intransitive verb transitive, one can add -if- to the root; to make a transitive verb intransitive, one can add -ez- to the root: