Like many other Western European languages, English historically allowed questions to be formed by inverting the positions of the verb and subject. Modern English permits this only in the case of a small class of verbs ("special verbs"), consisting of auxiliaries as well as forms of the copula "be" (see subject–auxiliary inversion). To form a question from a sentence which does not have such an auxiliary or copula present, the auxiliary verb "do" ("does", "did") needs to be inserted, along with inversion of the word order, to form a question (see "do"-support). For example: