Irusia wrote:Ukrainian doesn't have such equivalents at all. We don't shorten words. I've said that those endings were shortened forms of the verb "мати" (I've read it somewhere, but I don't remember where exactly), but they have completely different meaning than that verb (because the verb "мати" does not have the meaning of the future tense) and can be used only after infinitive.
That's one of the criteria IpseDixit pointed you to: A chief defining characteristics of a clitic is that it does
not attach to words of only one class. Compare the behaviour of the Ukrainian inflections to their Polish counterparts, which are true clitics:
Ty jego widzialeś. "You saw him."
Ty jegoś widzial. "You saw
him."
Tyś jego widzial. "
You saw him."
Is anything like this possible in Ukrainian?
Irusia wrote:I'm not sure what these endings are though, that's why I asked. Maybe it's better to ask about it in Ukrainian forum, I think.
Inflectional affixes. Their etymology isn't relevant for making this determination given the restrictions on their distribution. (A lot of verbal inflections developed from compounding non-finite forms such as participles and infinitives with worn-down finite verbs. Cf. Romance future tenses, the Korean past/perfective, the Turkish perfective and imperfective.)
"Richmond is a real scholar; Owen just learns languages because he can't bear not to know what other people are saying."--Margaret Lattimore on her two sons