Debitive mood
The debitive 'mood' is a grammatical mood used to express obligation or duty. Examples of languages with a morphological debitive mood are: Budukh, Kryts, Latvian, Malayalam.
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 jā-. Auxiliary verbs in case of compound tenses do not change, e.g., 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"More complex compound tenses/moods can be formed as well, e.g., quotative debitive: man būšot jālasa – "I will supposedly have to read," and so forth.
Some authors question the status of Latvian debitive as a mood on the grounds that a mood by definition cannot be combined with another mood Some speculate 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:
- Livonian: