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The six main indicative tenses in classical Latin are the following, using the verb dūcō as an example: [7] (a) Infectum tenses Present: dūcō 'I lead, I am leading' Future: dūcam 'I will lead, I will be leading' Imperfect: dūcēbam 'I was leading, I used to lead' (b) Perfectum tenses Perfect: dūxī 'I led, I have led'
The imperfect indicative generally has an imperfective meaning and describes situations in the past. Often the imperfect can be translated into English as 'was doing', but sometimes the simple tense 'did' or expressions such as 'used to do', 'would do', 'kept doing', 'began to do', 'had been doing' are more appropriate.
The word "conjugation" comes from the Latin coniugātiō, a calque of the Greek συζυγία (syzygia), literally "yoking together (horses into a team)". For examples of verbs and verb groups for each inflectional class, see the Wiktionary appendix pages for first conjugation , second conjugation , third conjugation , and fourth conjugation .
Latin is a heavily inflected language with largely free word order. Nouns are inflected for number and case; pronouns and adjectives (including participles) are inflected for number, case, and gender; and verbs are inflected for person, number, tense, aspect, voice, and mood.
Latin example English translation Comment imperfect in imperfect present in future 'present subjunctive' quaerēs fortāsse, cūr, cum haec in urbe sint, nōn absim, quemadmodum tū. (Cicero) [45] '[one day] you may ask yourself why, since this will take place in the city, I will not be away [from our city] like you' will do in English
The Latin gerundive is a form of the verb. It is composed of: the infectum stem (the stem used to form Present and Imperfect tense forms) a vowel appropriate to the verb class or conjugation of the verb; the suffix -nd-an adjectival Inflectional ending; For example:
Latin word order is relatively free. The verb may be found at the beginning, in the middle, or at the end of a sentence; an adjective may precede or follow its noun (vir bonus or bonus vir both mean 'a good man'); [5] and a genitive may precede or follow its noun ('the enemies' camp' can be both hostium castra and castra hostium; the latter is more common). [6]
From a semantic perspective, a tense is a temporal circumstance in which an event takes place relative to a given point in time. [i] [ii] [iii] It is absolute (primary) if it relates the represented event to the time of the speech event [iv] [v] [vi] [vii] and it is relative if it relates the represented event to the time of another event in the context of discourse.