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The infinitive has two main tenses (present and perfect) as well as a number of periphrastic tenses used in reported speech. Latin tenses do not have exact English equivalents, so that often the same tense can be translated in different ways depending on its context: for example, dūcō can be translated as 'I lead', 'I am leading' or 'I led ...
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 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]
The passive tenses also have feminine and neuter forms, e.g. amāta est "she was loved", nūntiātum est "it was announced". Forms made with fuī instead of sum and forem instead of essem are also found, for example amātus fuī, amātus fuerō, amātus forem and so on, but these are not common in classical Latin. See Latin tenses.
A regular Latin noun belongs to one of five main declensions, a group of nouns with similar inflected forms. The declensions are identified by the genitive singular form of the noun. The first declension, with a predominant ending letter of a , is signified by the genitive singular ending of -ae .
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.
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In reports of statements or ideas and in statements of facts known by others, the subject is represented by an 'accusative' noun and the event is represented by an 'infinitive' verb or verb group. For this reason, the structure of a reported statement is known as 'accusative and infinitive'.