To Be Or Not To Be

January Latin Challenge: Day 16

Today we are going to be delving into the very important, but often overlooked verb “to be” in Latin.

I am only going to look at active verbs in this post. There will be another post in the future where I go into passives, so make sure you subscribe for an update when I upload that!

Have you ever found yourself wondering: why is the verb “to be” so important?

Well, it the most frequently used verb in Latin. It allows for easy sentences, but also helps to compound lots of information in lists.

Now the verb “to be” is extra important in Latin, as it also attaches to other verbs to form them in different tenses and voices, and we will get onto that below.

Present Tense

To start with, let’s look at the easiest version - the present tense. This is the tense happening now.

Usually we would expect -o, -s, -t, -mus, -tis, -nt as our endings, added on to a single clear stem. However, the verb “to be” is slightly different.

NB: These are not endings, but the whole word.

In the 1st person, I and we, the words are different to the others - sum and sumus. The others however, all follow the pattern that we have seen! Take some time to familiarise yourself with them.

If you want to gain more confidence with your verb endings, go and download my free Complete Guide to Latin Verbs here. It has the endings for every tense, voice and mood, and is completely free. I just want to help people gain confidence in verbs - so go and grab it if that’s something you want to work on. 

Imperfect Tense

The imperfect tense is a continuous action in the past. It is translated as “was” or “were”. Now this does not have the -bam, -bas, -bat endings that we are used to for the imperfect tense, but again the endings do generally follow the person endings we expect.

Top Tip:

You might recognise this as the pluperfect ending, and you are right - if this is attached to the perfect stem of a verb, it make is a pluperfect tense. However, on it’s own, it is the imperfect of the verb to be.

Perfect tense

This is a completed action in the past. You can translate it in a couple of ways - “I were…”, which sounds odd, but if you say “I were happier back then” it shows the completed sense of the verb - it is no longer the case. Or to make it simpler, we usually translate it as “I have been”.

You can also get away with “I was” sometimes, but be careful using this if you are being asked for the tense, to save confusion with the imperfect.

To form it, this is the 3rd principal part, so for sum, esse, fui, futurus - you use fui. Then the perfect just adds the endings of the perfect tense that you would usually expect: -i, -isti, -it, -imus, -istis, -erunt. 

Pluperfect Tense

Remember this is the extra past tense . It is translated as “had been”. Now if you go back to my note about the imperfect tense, you can hopefully see again that this one uses the imperfect endings of the verb “to be”, and is added to the same 3rd principal part that I used for the perfect tense: fui, fuisti, fuit stem.

Taking fu- plus the imperfect tense of the verb “to be” (eram eras erat) gives me the pluperfect. 

Future Tense

The future tense of the verb “to be” is also useful for other tenses of regular verbs.

These will be familiar if you read yesterday’s January Latin Challenge: Day 15 What the Heck is the Future Perfect? This makes the future perfect endings when attached to a 3rd principal part. However, on it’s own, this is just the simple future - I will be, you will be, and so on. 

Future Perfect

Finally the future perfect - “I will have been”. This is a completed action in the future. This is again formed with that perfect stem, fui, and the endings are the simple future tense of the verb “to be”.

Infinitive

Last thing to mention in this run down of the verb “to be” is the infinitive. This is used in a lot of passive and subjunctive versions of verbs, so be sure to understand how it works.

esse, the 2nd principal part, is my present active infinitive. It means “to be”.

It is often used in sentences like indirect statements, or after command words, which are more complex than what we have been doing in the January Latin Challenge, but will become important as you progress in Latin.

The perfect active infinitive is formed using the 3rd principal part - fui, and then adding -sse (from esse) onto the end: fuisse. “To have been”.

Finally, the future active infinitive is formed from the 4th principal part - futurus - and adding on the esse again as a separate word - futurus esse. This means “to be about to be”.

Why is it so annoying?

Now my students always get annoyed by this verb, because they don’t understand why it is so irregular. However, I always like to show people this. Here is the verb “to be” in French, Spanish and Italian as well as English.

The verb “to be” is irregular in all of these languages! This is because it is used so often, and so changed over time as these languages formed. So don’t panic, and try to find the themes that help you to remember it. 

I hope this post has helped you with the active forms of the verb to be. Don’t forget to check out my other posts about Latin verbs here if you need more help with any of the tenses we have looked at today, and subscribe to get future posts from bambasbat.

I hope you have enjoyed this lesson! Thanks for reading, and I’ll see you tomorrow on bambasbat for Day 17 of the January Latin Challenge!