the word merged with the indefinite sense so that pālāxā became "a/the (male) worker" and pālaxtā became "a/the (female) worker." Consonantal root Most NENA nouns and verbs are built from triconsonantal roots, which are a form of word formation in which the root is modified and which does not involve stringing morphemes together sequentially. Unlike Arabic, broken plurals are not present. Semitic languages typically utilise triconsonantal roots, forming a "grid" into which vowels may be inserted without affecting the basic root. The root () has the basic meaning of "taking", and the following are some words that can be formed from this root: (): "he has taken" (literally "taken-by him") (): "he takes" (): "she takes" (): "take!" (): "taking" (): "taken" Tenses Suret has lost the perfect and imperfect morphological tenses common in other Semitic languages. The present tense is usually marked with the subject pronoun followed by the participle; however, such pronouns are usually omitted in the case of the third person. This use of the participle to mark the present tense is the most common of a number of compound tenses that can be used to express varying senses of tense and aspect. Suret's new system of inflection is claimed to resemble the one of the Indo-European languages, namely the Iranian languages. This assertion is founded on the utilisation of an active participle concerted with a copula and a passive participle with a genitive/dative element which is present in Old Persian and in Neo-Aramaic. Both Modern Persian and Suret build the present perfect tense around the past/resultative participle in conjunct with the copula (though the placing and form of the copula unveil crucial differences). The more conservative Suret dialects lay the copula in its full shape before the verbal constituent. In the Iraqi and Iranian dialects, the previous construction is addressable with different types of the copula (e.g. deictic) but with the elemental copula only the cliticised form is permitted. Among conservative Urmian speakers, only the construction with the enclitic ordered after the verbal constituent is allowed. Due to language contact, the similarities between Kurdish and Modern Persian and the Urmian dialects become even more evident with their negated forms of present perfect, where they display close similarities. A recent feature of Suret is the usage of the infinitive instead of the present base for the expression of the present progressive, which is also united with the