Sanskrit verbs

Sanskrit has, together with Ancient Greek, kept most intact among descendants the elaborate verbal morphology of Proto-Indo-European. Sanskrit verbs thus have an inflection system for different combinations of tense, aspect, mood, voice, number, and person. Non-finite forms such as participles are also extensively used.

Some of the features of the verbal system, however, have been lost in the classical language, compared to the older Vedic Sanskrit, and in other cases, distinctions that have existed between different tenses have been blurred in the later language. Classical Sanskrit thus does not have the subjunctive or the injunctive mood, has dropped a variety of infinitive forms, and the distinctions in meaning between the imperfect, perfect and aorist forms are barely maintained and ultimately lost.