Atlas of Pidgin and Creole Language Structures Online

To be rigourous, Past tense in Diu Indo-Portuguese is expressed through verbal inflection, viz. through the use of various verbal suffixes:

e.g.

- pɛga 'to take' - pɛg-o 'took'
- bebe 'to drink' - bebe-w 'drank'
- subi 'to climb' - subi-w 'climbed'

For certain frequent verbs, past forms are suppletive:

e.g.

- vay 'to go' - foy 'went'
- traze 'to bring' - tros 'brought'

The forms above are, however, perfective. Imperfective aspect, on the other hand, is marked by a preverbal auxiliary te, which is verbal in nature and therefore acquires past tense inflection instead of the main verb.

For the purpose of this feature, what I am treating as a 'particle' is in fact the Past form of the perfective auxiliary: tiŋ (e.g. yo tiŋ kume 'I was eating'). No grammatical markers or lexical items can intervene between tiŋ and the main verb.

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Particle, nothing can intervene