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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 ...
The ancient Romans themselves, beginning with Varro (1st century BC), originally divided their verbs into three conjugations (coniugationes verbis accidunt tres: prima, secunda, tertia "there are three different conjugations for verbs: the first, second, and third" (), 4th century AD), according to whether the ending of the 2nd person singular had an a, an e or an i in it. [2]
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.
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]
In Latin, there are different modes of indicating past, present and future processes. There is the basic mode of free clauses and there are multiple dependent modes found exclusively in dependent clauses. [1] In particular, there is the 'infinitive' mode for reported satetements and the 'subjunctive' mode for reported questions.
Latin declension is the set of patterns according to which Latin words are declined—that is, have their endings altered to show grammatical case, number and gender. Nouns, pronouns, and adjectives are declined (verbs are conjugated ), and a given pattern is called a declension.
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.