Verb Tenses

[lonfalcon07]

Hey!
I need help with verb tenses; how to recognize them and how to remember which one is which translation. Thanks!!

[classicalclarinet]

You can look through several of the grammars posted at Textkit here to learn how to conjugate. It might help if you were a wee more specific though.

[benissimus]

Hey!
I need help with verb tenses; how to recognize them and how to remember which one is which translation. Thanks!!

Yes, do have a look at Allen & Greenough:
http://www.textkit.com/learn/ID/109/author_id/42/

For general purposes as examples:
present: I love / I am loving / I do love
future: I shall love / I shall be loving
imperfect: I was loving / I used to love (be loving) / I kept loving / I did love / I loved
perfect: I have loved / I have been loving / I loved
pluperfect: I had loved / I had been loving
future perfect: I shall have loved / I shall have been loving

The forms for each tense must be memorized. This will happen as you proceed through your course of learning Latin. It would be silly to just look up all the forms and try to memorize them at once, since there are a great many of them. If you really want to see all the forms they are in the Latin grammar.

[Anna Coluthon]

A handy functional approach to recognizing verb tenses is to

(1) identify the stem

The principle parts of your Latin verb show you all your stems--

1st and 2nd pp give you the present stem used in the present, future and imperfect tenses, both active and passive voices

3rd pp gives you the perfect active stem, used in the perfect, pluperfect and future perfect tenses of the active voice

4th pp gives you the perfect passive participle used in the formation of the periphrastic passive tenses of the perfect, pluperfect and future perfect tenses

(2) identify any tense signs attached to the stem

In the present stem system of tenses, the

present tense has no tense sign (rather just appends active or passive
personal endings to the stem)

future has tense sign -bi- for 1st and 2nd conjugation verbs
-e- for 3rd and 4th conjugation verbs

imperfect has tense sign -ba- throughout

In the perfect active system of tenses, the

perfect active has no tense sign (rather just appends the perfect active set
personal endings to the stem)

pluperperfect active has tense sign -era-

future perfective active has tense sign -eri-

In the perfect passive system of tenses, you can identify the tense of the verb phrase by the form of the auxiliary verb to be:

perfect passive uses the present tense of sum
pluperfect passive uses the imperfect tense, eram
future perfect passive uses the future tense, ero


(3) then you can of course identify the person, number and voice of the verb form in question from the final set of endings.


If you look at a few 3rd person synopses you can see the utility of this system most clearly--various adjustments must be made in other persons, the 1st singular in particular, between competing vowel interests, but overall this works admirably well for analyzing as opposed to generating verb forms.

Good luck!

[Anna Coluthon]

N. B. The above deals strictly with the indicative mood of verbs--I kind of reckoned, perhaps incorrectly, that you were'nt yet concerned with the subjunctive?