Everything You Need To Know About Latin Verbs in fewer than 400 words
January Latin Challenge: Day 10 of 31
How to translate any Latin verb
Welcome back to bambasbat for day 10 of the January Latin Challenge. I’ve set myself a challenge today to explain the 5 things you need to identify in any Latin verb to translate it, but only using 400 words to do it!
This is just an overview - for a full rundown of all the endings you might ever need to know, download my free reference guide to Latin verbs from here.
Where endings start
In Latin, endings are the most important thing.
For verbs, you need to be able to split the endings from the stem. The stem is the bit you get in a dictionary, and the ending tells you the following things:
Person, Number, Tense, Voice and Mood
Person endings: this tells you WHO is doing the verb.
Generally people use o, s, t, mus, tis, nt as their basis for person endings, and that is great - just be careful. Some tenses don’t follow these rules.
Number: the person ending also tells you how many people are doing the verb (one or many).
The tense tells you when the action is happening.
Present is happening now, Future will happen, and imperfect was happening. These three all use the present stem.
The perfect tense means the verb has already happened, the pluperfect had happened, and the future perfect will have happened. These three tenses use the perfect stem (found as the 3rd principle part in a dictionary entry)
The voice of a verb is whether it is active or passive. This tells me whether the verb is being done BY the nominative, or is being done TO the nominative.
An easy way to remember the r, ris, tur, mur, mini, ntur passive endings, but again you can find the full table in the verb reference booklet.
The mood of the verb tells me whether it is a fact, or a conditional - meaning indicative or subjunctive. An indicative tells me something has happened, or will happen in the future. A subjunctive is something that might happen.
That’s the 5 essentials you need to know about a verb to translate it!
Most of these things will be covered in great detail in the January Latin Challenge, so make sure to sign up so you don’t miss out!
See you tomorrow on bambasbat for Day 11 of the January Latin Challenge!
Final word count: 397