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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 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 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.
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 example English translation Comment perfect in imperfect past in present 'perfect subjunctive' mīror, quid causae fuerit quā rē cōnsilium mūtārīs. (Cicero) [52] 'I wonder what the reason was that you changed your plan' did in English quid tāmen agās, quaerō, et an tuīs pedibus pervēnerīs domum. (Petronius) [53]
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 ...