Reducing the Tension of Tenses
January Latin Challenge: Day 17
Hi everyone, and welcome back to bambasbat and the January Latin Challenge.
Do you get tenses confused in Latin? Well after reading this post, you won’t! I am going to break down the different tenses to show you where they all fall on a timeline of actions.
Before we start, I want to give you my free guide to all the verb endings in Latin. Its got everything you need to help you identify all verbs in Latin, from the basics right the way through to the most advanced grammar. It has all the endings for every tense, voice and mood, so will be really useful as you start getting familiar with these verb endings. You probably won’t need it all at once, but one day it will all come in really handy.
Why have tenses?
Tenses in Latin are absolutely essential to get right in your translations, as you do get marks for accuracy. However, you can’t do that if you don’t know how the tenses relate to one another.
If you want a complete explanation of any of the tenses I go over in this post, you can find more in depth explanations on each tense here in the bambasbat archive. Today, this is just a wrap up of all of them in one go.
How do all the tenses fit together?
Here is a very useful timeline of Latin tenses to help you visualise this:
Let’s start with the present tense, the action is happening right now. “I am walking”. This is my starting point. It uses that first principal part in Latin - ambulo.
Then we have the future tenses. There are two which are both, very useful in stories or speeches.
First, the simple future. These are events that haven’t happened yet but WILL happen. “I will walk”. This uses the present tense stem, but remember that for the 1st and 2nd conjugation you use -bo, -bis, -bit, and for the 3rd and 4th you use -am, -es, -et.
In this group we also have the future perfect, which are actions that will, at a point in the future, have already happened. “I will have walked”. This is a completed action in the future.
This tense doesn’t use the present stem. Instead it uses the PERFECT stem, which is the third principal part in Latin: ambulavi. We take off the -i (a perfect ending) and add the -ero, -eris, -erit endings.
Don’t forget you can find more in depth explanations of all these tenses here.
Then we get to the past tenses. There are 3 of these in Latin, and they all have a range of meanings.
We have the imperfect, which is a continuous action in the past - “I was walking”. This uses the present stem, that first principal part again, with -bam, -bas, -bat as the ending. It can also mean I used to do something, so “I used to walk”.
The perfect tense, which is a completed action in the past. This is an action that has already happened. For example, “I walked”.
This uses the 3rd principal part, the perfect stem, to form it. Remember that this can be really different from the present stem.
ambulo, ambulare, ambulavi, ambulatus is not very different, but fero, ferre, tuli, latus is a good example of a verb that is exceptionally irregular in its stem, so be sure to learn the principal parts when you are learning verbs!
The perfect tense can also be translated as “I have walked” - sometimes this is better for fluency, so just keep it in mind.
Finally, still in the past tense, we have the pluperfect tense. I love this tense because it’s name is so literal - pluperfect basically means “plus perfect”, as in more than perfect. It is a completed action further back in the past.
That’s hard to get your head around, but basically remember that you translate it as HAD.
“I had walked to the shop when my bag broke”. The walking had already been completed by the time the bag broke, so I have to put it in the “extra past” tense.
This tense is also formed using the perfect tense stem. You take off the -i from the 3rd principal part and add on -eram, -eras, -erat and so on.
Different stems
So here are the tenses that use the present stem, and the tenses that use the perfect stem.
Luckily, the ones that use the perfect stem all have the word “perfect” in there to help you, but you have to remember that the imperfect tense literally “isn’t perfect”, so it uses the present stem instead.
A quick note about the imperfect/perfect tenses:
The imperfect is also often translated as a normal perfect tense in English - this is just for fluency. For example, Roman authors often use the imperfect to show things happening all at once, like “the army was approaching and was attacking the city.” You can just say “the army approached and attacked the city”.
Fluency is often rewarded in exam/translation conditions, rather than a very stiff and clunky translation of the imperfect tense. If you are worried, you can always write (imperfect) next to your translation of it to show your understanding, but that you have chosen to highlight fluency.
And that’s a quick overview of all the tenses in Latin. I have just focused on active verbs in this post, if you want passive verbs you will be able to find posts on this topic later in the January Latin Challenge! Be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss those posts!
I hope you have found this helpful! Let me know if you have any questions, or if you have any grammar topics you want me to cover! Thanks for reading, and I’ll see you tomorrow on bambasbat for Day 18 of the January Latin Challenge!