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The main Latin tenses can be divided into two groups: the present system (also known as infectum tenses), consisting of the present, future, and imperfect; and the perfect system (also known as perfectum tenses), consisting of the perfect, future perfect, and pluperfect. [1] [2] [3] [4]
The Latin perfect has a dual meaning. It can describe a past event with a present result (e.g. 'he has died (and is laying dead somewhere)') or a past event without a present result (e.g. 'he died (last year)'). The perfect of cōnsuēscō, cōnsuēvī 'I have grown accustomed', is also often used with a present meaning: [125]
Just as a 'perfect indicative' verb can represent either a past event or the present result (e.g. 'he has died' = 'he is dead'), so the perfect periphrasis with the 'perfect infinitive' auxiliary fuisse often represent either a past-in-past event or present-in-past result at the time of the reported statement.
Latin also exhibits verb framing in which the path of motion is encoded into the verb rather than shown by a separate word or phrase. For example, the Latin verb exit (a compound of ex and it) means "he/she/it goes out". In this article a line over a vowel (e.g. ē) indicates that it is long.
The word perfect in this sense means "completed" (from Latin perfectum, which is the perfect passive participle of the verb perficere "to complete"). In traditional Latin and Ancient Greek grammar, the perfect tense is a particular, conjugated -verb form.
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 imperfect of ser is likewise a continuation of the Latin imperfect (of esse), with the same stem appearing in tú eres (thanks to pre-classical Latin rhotacism). The imperfect of ver (veía etc.) was historically considered regular in Old Spanish, where the infinitive veer provided the stem ve-, but that is no longer the case in standard ...
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.