Czech Verbs - Participles

Participles are used for forming the past tense, conditionals and the passive voice in Czech. They are related to the short forms of adjectives. Therefore unlike other verb forms, they also express gender which must correspond with the gender of the subject.

Past participle

(more precisely “active participle”) is also called “l-participle” and is used for forming the past tense and the conditionals.

Passive participle

is also called “n/t-participle” and is used for forming the passive voice. There are two types of endings:

Agreement between subject and predicate

The predicate must always be in accordance with the subject in the sentence – in number and person (personal pronouns), and with past and passive participles also in gender. Thisgrammatical principle affects the orthography (see also Czech orthography) – it is especially important for the correct choice and writing of plural endings of participles.

Examples:

The example mentioned shows both past (byl, byla …) and passive (koupen, koupena …) participles. The accordance in gender takes effect in the past tense and the passive voice, not in the present and future tenses in active voice.

If the complex subject is a combination of nouns of different genders, masculine animate gender is prior to others and the masculine inanimate and feminine genders are prior to the neuter gender.

Examples:

muži a ženy byli - men and women were

kočky a koťata byly - cats and kittens were

my jsme byli (my = we all/men) vs. my jsme byly (my = we women) - we were

Priority of genders:

masculine animate > masculine inanimate & feminine > neuter

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