The debitive mood (abbreviated ) 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 . Auxiliary verbs in case of compound tenses do not change, e.g., – "I have to read, I had to read, I have had to read, I will have to read, I should have read" (literally "I will have to have read" where the future expresses rather a wish and replacing the future with subjunctive () would be less unorthodox.) More complex compound tenses/moods can be formed as well, e.g., quotative debitive: man – "I will supposedly have to read," and so forth.
Some authorsÖsten Dahl, Maria Koptjevskaja-Tamm. The Circum-Baltic Languages: Grammar and typology. . "It was Endzelīns who first described the debitive as a mood, an explanation that is not free of problems since as a rule one mood may not be combined with another." question the status of Latvian debitive as a mood on the grounds that a mood by definition cannot be combined with another mood (as can be seen above.) Some speculateBjörn Hansen, Ferdinand De Haan. Modals in the Languages of Europe: A Reference Work. . "(..) seem to be connected with this language's failure to develop a personal verb for 'to have' on which necessitive constructions could be based or modelled. (..) is a truncated form of , the imperative of 'let'" 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:
In Livonian, a Finnic language, the word vajāg (necessary) is used with nouns, for example: Livonian:
Dravidian languages
Malayalam In Malayalam, the debitive is formed with the suffix -aɳam (-അണസ്), an enclitic form of veeɳam (വേണസ്).
References