[Loyola University Chicago]

Concepts for the Study of Latin
tiger mosaic, Basilica of Junius Bassus, Rome; photo J. Long 1 August 2006
Don't let confusion seize you.
The Cambridge Latin Course presents concepts, patterns, and words of Latin through reading Latin text, in a sequence that is intended to build up overall comprehension of the language. For many people, however, comprehension comes clearest if you know as you go where the elements you're focusing on at present fit into the scheme overall. This website is intended to offer that guidance.
  • adverbs
  • predicates
  • verbs

    Verbs:

    Finite verb-forms in Latin change their forms according to person, number, tense, mood, and voice. Latin's non-finite verb-forms involve tense and voice as well as the features of the parts of speech they belong to. The activity of generating verb-forms is called conjugation; the patterns in which different verbs generate their forms are also called conjugations.

    Finitude:

    Verbs give names to actions. But although it's good to identify whether you're contemplating a matter of seeing rather than hearing, splintering rather than hibernating, the name of the action alone doesn't tell you how the action is operating. Is the action being performed, or are you considering it in the abstract? Is the performance potential or actual? Who's doing it? When does the action happen? Such criteria limit the field of reference potentially embraced by the verb, pinning it down within specified ranges of possibility.
    • Finite verbs attach the name of the action to a subject of some person and number, as actually or with some kind of potentiality performing the action or experiencing its performance, in some time-frame, with some duration: all the limits that define the performance of the action are established. A finite verb is capable of acting as the predicate of a sentence, as in, "The astronaut walks."
    • Non-finite verbs don't connect the name of the action to the subject, but present the action for contemplation in some other way
      Infinitives present the abstract idea of the action as a noun, the name of that abstract idea. They can serve, for example, as the subject of a sentence:
      "To err is human, to forgive, divine."
      Gerunds also present the abstract idea of the action as a noun. They are used in Latin, in the oblique cases, when you need the abstract idea of the action to be something other than the subject of a sentence:
      "By working out regularly, you make yourself strong."
      Participles present the idea of the action as an adjective, describing a noun as performing the action or being acted upon, in some time-frame relative to the rest of the sentence:
      "The attending Muse inspires the artist."

    Sven Gier, Cubic

    Person:
    "Who are YOU?"

    Specifically, the grammatical parameter of person identifies how closely the entity in consideration is identified with the ego or scales out to more remote perspectives.

    Most Ego-Identified Perspective
    Intermediately Ego-Identified Perspective
    Least Ego-Identified Perspective
    first person
    second person
    third person
    I/me/my/mine
    we/us/our/ours
    you/you/your/yours
    you/you/your/yours
    he/him/his/his, she/her/her/hers, it/it/its/its
    they/them/their/theirs
    "I ask" = rogo
    "we ask" = rogamus
    "you ask" = rogas
    "you ask" = rogatis
    "he/she/it asks" = rogat
    "they ask" = rogant

    Number:

    "How many?"

    As far as Latin verbs are concerned, the vital distinction in number is between one and more-than-one.

    • If a finite verb is singular in number, one person is the subject (also the other way round), as in "Mother knows."
    • If a finite verb is plural in number, more than one person is the subject (also the other way round), as in "The children have been fed."
      The rule is, Subject and verb always match.

    Tense:
    When are we?

    Grammatical tense is nothing about which to feel anxiety. It is something funny that happened to the Latin word for "time" while it was on its way into English, roundabout through Old French. Tense is the parameter that sets the performance of a finite verb, or the idea represented by a non-finite verbal noun or verbal adjective, into a specific time frame.

    Depending on other parameters limiting the verb-form, the verb's tense may establish its time-value absolutely or relative to other elements of the thought, as in:

    • "A tomb now suffices him for whom the whole world was not sufficient." (epitaph traditionally supposed to have appeared on the tomb of Alexander the Great: finite verb, fact, present time, absolute)
    • "A great part of courage is the courage of having done the thing before." (Ralph Waldo Emerson: gerund, prior action, relative)

    Mood:

    As a grammatical term, mood measures how real the action placed in consideration is supposed to be.

    Finite verbs in Latin can appear in three different moods:

    • Verbs in the indicative indicate the action is being considered as a matter of fact, something capable of being either true or not-true, as in "The couple is conversing" or "Do you agree?"
    • Verbs in the imperative indicate the action is being considered as a command, as in "Lighten up and be reasonable!"
    • Verbs in the subjunctive indicate the action is being considered as having some kind of potentiality, as in "Humanity may be doomed" or "Would we have done it better?"

    Voice:


    Voice is the quality of the verb that indicates the subject's relationship to the action:
    Does the subject perform the action? Is the subject acted upon by the action?
    The verb is active.
    The verb is passive.
    		A class of Latin verbs called deponents, because the verbs have "laid aside" certain forms most Latin verbs employ, may be explained with reference to the concept of a third voice. It is called the middle voice, but it embraces the ideas of both active and passive voices rather than falling at some midpoint between them: the development of these verbs in Latin was shaped by the idea their subjects both act and experience being acted upon. For example, vescor means "I feed [myself] upon" some sort of food. Since English does not use a middle voice, however, Latin deponent verbs are usually most closely translated by English active verbs, even though the deponent verbs' forms usually look like Latin passive verbs.

    Transitivity:

    Transitivity is the property of a verb to take a direct object: does the action of the verb "go across" to exert an impact?
    In Latin, transitivity has a simple formal definition:
    • If a Latin verb takes its object in the accusative case, the verb is transitive.
      faber nummos cudit. = "The workman is striking coins."
    • Active-voice sentences in which the verb is transitive can be converted to passive voice with the direct object becoming the subject, and still describe the same action, give or take the shift of emphasis.
      nummi a fabro cuduntur. = "The coins are being struck by the workman."
    • If a Latin verb cannot take an object in the accusative, but only some other case instead, the verb is intransitive, "not transitive". A verb's being transitive or intransitive in one language (like Latin) has nothing directly to do with whether the verb of the most nearly corresponding meaning is transitive or intransitive in some other language (like English): it's all a matter of how the users of the verb's language thought of the action as operating that the verb names. Whether a Latin verb is transitive or intransitive must be learned as a property of that verb; if it is intransitive, learn also which case the verb uses for its object.
      faber tribusviris oboedit. = "The workman obeys the magistrates."
    • Intransitive verbs continue to need to take whatever case they take, whether they're operating in the active or the passive, so a passive sentence with an intransitive verb in Latin does not have a subject in the nominative. The verb will be third-person singular: this usage gets called the impersonal passive. English may need to pull a noun out of the meaning of the verb, in order not to sound incredibly awkward.
      tribusviris a fabro oboeditur. = "Obedience is shown to the magistrates by the workman."

    Aspect:

    Aspect is the quality of a verb-form by which it ascribes some kind of duration to the action it names.

    English's auxiliary verbs make it almost infinitely capable of distinguishing minutely among different kinds of aspect. In order to move between English and Latin, however, a few major distinctions suffice.
    simple aspect continuous aspect completed aspect
    future time "I shall run"
    "you will run"
    Latin future tense
    		 "he will be running"
    "she will keep on running"
    Latin future tense
    		 "it shall have run"
    Latin future perfect tense
    present time "we run"
    "you do run"
    Latin present tense
    		 "they are running"
    Latin present tense
    		 "I have run"
    Latin perfect tense
    past time "you ran"
    "she did run"
    Latin perfect tense
    		 "he was running"
    "it used to run"
    Latin imperfect tense
    		 "we had run"
    Latin pluperfect tense

    Conjugations and Principal Parts:

    When you are systematically generating verb-forms, the activity is called conjugating the verb. The regular patterns in which most verbs' forms are generated are called the conjugations. Both terms derive from the Latin word for a yoke, holding the different elements together the way a non-metaphorical yokes holds together a pair of oxen.

    There are four main patterns into which Latin verbs are conventionally divided, but the one traditionally numbered third includes one major subdivision: call it four and a half. The four main patterns are conveniently distinguished according to which vowel at the end of the present stem, the base on which the present tense (and some other tenses) is formed. This vowel is often called the thematic vowel. Irregular Latin verbs, that don't follow one of the standard patterns, are called athematic because they don't have a thematic vowel. (Some books call the "thematic vowel" the "characteristic vowel" or the "key vowel", but for irregular verbs the only popular choices are "irregular" and "athematic.") The major subdivision in the third conjugation has the same thematic vowel as the rest of the third conjugation, but another vowel at the end of the stem of these verbs creates some apparent differences in the way the thematic vowel ends up appearing in verb-forms.

    The principal parts are the minimum set of verb-forms you need to know, along with the rules for generating forms, in order to be able to generate all the forms the verb can take. In Latin, there are four principal parts:

    1st person singular present active indicative present active infinitive 1st person singular perfect active indicative perfect passive participle