bekamst

Bekamst is a grammatical form in the German language. It denotes the second-person singular subject in the simple past tense of the verb bekommen, meaning "you received." In standard written German, this past tense is usually realized as two words: du bekamst. The single-word form bekamt or bekamst is rarely used in contemporary writing and is more commonly seen in older texts or in certain dialects, where inflected verb forms sometimes appear without an explicit subject pronoun.

Morphology and paradigm: bekamen is the stem in the preterite, with person-specific endings added. The full preterite paradigm for bekommen is: ich bekam, du bekamst, er/sie/es bekam, wir bekamen, ihr bekamt, sie bekamen. The form bekamt corresponds to the second-person plural in some historical spellings, while in modern standard German the usual written form is du bekamst (two words).

Usage and register: The preterite bekamt (and the two-word form du bekamst) is used to narrate past events in written German or formal narration. In everyday spoken German, speakers commonly use the present perfect form du hast bekommen to describe past events, particularly in colloquial contexts.

Etymology and relations: The verb bekommen is formed with the prefix be- added to the verb kommen (to come), implying a sense of coming to one’s possession. Bekamst is the second-person past-tense inflection of this verb.

See also: bekommen, Präteritum, German verb conjugation, German grammar.

Bekamst thus serves primarily as a historical or formal past-tense form illustrating how haben-like auxiliary verbs are not required for set past narratives in German, where bekommen’s imperfect forms remain a standard example of past tense inflection.