Week 4

Conjugation and the Present Tense

Latin verbs are stereotypically difficult, but that is less because there is anything especially troubling about them and more that there are just a lot of forms you need to learn. Luckily, we're going to start very slowly, so there is no need to be worried.

When I introduced declension, I first introduced you to the idea of inflection; that is, changing the endings of words to match their roles in sentence. Nouns, pronouns, and adjectives inflect by case and number in declension, but declension is not the only form of inflection in Latin. Verbs inflect too by mood, voice, tense, person, and number, and this process is called conjugation. You might already be familiar with conjugation if you've studied other European languages like Spanish, French, and Italian. In fact, you might even be familiar with it from English alone. Take the word to eat. If I am the one doing it, I say: I eat. But if my friend is the one doing it, I say: my friend eats. Note the addition of the letter 's' to the second case. This is a result of conjugation.

I said before that verbs conjugate based on mood, voice, tense, person, and number, but today we're going to be focusing on the indicative mood, active voice, present tense, the same tense you would normally think of when you think of the present tense. There are two others moods (subjunctive and imperative), one other voice (passive), and sever other tenses (imperfect, future, perfect, pluperfect, and future perfect), but we can discuss those another day. Today, we will just be conjugating with respect to person and number.

Person refers to the actor of the verb's action.

• If it is I or we doing the action, the verb is in the first person.

• If it is you or you guys doing the action, the verb is in the second person.

• And if it is he, she, it, they, or some external entity doing the action, the verb is in the third person.

Number on the other hand just refers to whether the one doing the action is an individual or multiple people/things.

And just as there were five declensions of nouns which each got their own endings for case and number, there are four conjugations in Latin, each with their own endings for mood, voice, tense, person, and number. Like with Spanish and French, for now we can think of these groups in terms of the endings of their infinitives. An infinitive is the 'to' form of the verb, such as 'to eat,' 'to drink,' and 'to die,' in English. In Latin, these expressions are one word and with minimal exceptions (such as the verb 'to be,' esse), every verb will have an infinitive bearing it access to one of the four following conjugation groups.

• The first conjugation has verbs whose infinitives end in -āre such as clamāre (to shout).

• The second conjugation has verbs whose infinitives end in -ēre such as sedēre (to sit).

• The third conjugation has verbs whose infinitives end in -ere such as ducere (to lead).

• The fourth conjugation has verbs whose infinitives end in -īre such as dormīre (to sleep).

The present tense endings of all four conjugations are listed on the chart below. To find a form, you can take the ending off any other form and replace it with the one you want. I will be providing all new verbs you learn in their infinitive forms, so all you will need to do is take the infinitive endings off the verb and add the conjugated ones to get the different forms of the verb. For example, if I have the second conjugation verb sedēre and I want to say I sit in Latin, I can remove the -ēre infinitive ending and add the first-person singular ending -eō instead to get sedeō. The same goes for all other forms.

You are welcome to learn the entire below chart this week and if you do so, it will certainly make it easy for you to go between English and Latin for all your verbs in the future; but, there is a more simple way for you to get the gist. Take a deeper look at the chart. Do you see any patterns among the forms? Regardless of conjugation group, all regular verbs end in similar ways depending on person and gender, and consequently you can learn the simplified chart on the right for your endings instead of the complete one on the bottom. You won't be able to use it the exact same way, because each declension's ending is a little bit more than the simplified ones on the side chart, but if you know just those endings it should make your life easier when recognizing forms in Latin.

So how are you feeling? Are you able to conjugate? Try the following questions out quickly.

• If gustat means he tastes, how do I say to taste?

• If sedēre means to sit, how do I say you sit?

• If audīmus means we hear, how do I say they hear?

As always, feel free to reach out if you have any questions!