debitive mood
{{Short description|Grammatical mood}}
The debitive mood (abbreviated {{Sc|DEB}}) is a grammatical mood used to express obligation or duty. Examples of languages with a morphological debitive mood are: Budukh, Kryts, Latvian, Malayalam.{{Cite book |last1=Asher |first1=R. E. |title=Malayalam |last2=Kumari |first2=T. C. |publisher=Routledge |year=2012 |isbn=978-0-415-64381-8 |pages=306–308 |orig-year=First published 1997}}{{Cite book |last1=Authier |first1=Gilles |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=wCpOOo0Bd9MC&q=debitive+&pg=PP1 |title=Tense, Aspect, Modality and Finiteness in East Caucasian Languages |last2=Maĭsak |first2=Timur Anatolʹevich |date=2011 |publisher=Brockmeyer Verlag |isbn=978-3-8196-0800-1 |language=en}}
Indo-European languages
= Latvian =
In debitive mood all persons are formed by declining the pronoun in the dative case and using the 3rd person present stem prefixed with {{lang|lv|jā-}}. Auxiliary verbs in case of compound tenses do not change, e.g., {{lang|lv|man jālasa, man bija jālasa, man ir bijis jālasa, man būs jālasa, man būs bijis jālasa}} – "I have to read, I had to read, I have had to read, I will have to read, I should have read" (literally "I will have to had read" where the future expresses rather a wish and replacing the future with subjunctive ({{lang|lv|man būtu bijis jālasa}}) would be less unorthodox.)
More complex compound tenses/moods can be formed as well, e.g., quotative debitive: man {{lang|lv|būšot jālasa}} – "I will supposedly have to read," and so forth.
Some authorsÖsten Dahl, Maria Koptjevskaja-Tamm. The Circum-Baltic Languages: Grammar and typology. {{ISBN|9781588110428}}. "It was Endzelīns who first described the debitive as a mood, an explanation that is not free of problems since as a rule one mood may not be combined with another." question the status of Latvian debitive as a mood on the grounds that a mood by definition cannot be combined with another mood (as can be seen above.) Some speculateBjörn Hansen, Ferdinand De Haan. Modals in the Languages of Europe: A Reference Work. {{ISBN|9783110219203}}. "(..) seem to be connected with this language's failure to develop a personal verb for 'to have' on which necessitive constructions could be based or modelled. (..) {{lang|lv|Lai}} is a truncated form of {{lang|lv|laid}}, the imperative of {{lang|lv|laist}} 'let'" that the failure of Latvian to develop a verb "to have" has contributed to the development of debitive. To express possession of something as well as necessity Latvian uses similar constructions to those used by Finnic languages, for example:
- Latvian:
{{interlinear|lang=lv|indent=3
|Man vajag iet
|I:DAT need:3.PRES.IND go:INF
|literally "to me needs to go" using the modal {{lang|lv|vajadzēt}} that can be conjugated only in the 3rd person
}}
- Livonian: {{lang|liv|Minnõn um vajag lädõ}}, (literally "to me is need to go.")