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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 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.
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]
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.
Thus all those Latin verbs which in the present tense have 1st singular -ō, 2nd singular -ās, and infinitive -āre are said to belong to the 1st conjugation, those with 1st singular -eō, 2nd singular -ēs and infinitive -ēre belong to the 2nd conjugation, and so on. The number of conjugations of regular verbs is usually said to be four.
Latin word order is relatively free. The subject, object, and verb can come in any order, and an adjective can go before or after its noun, as can a genitive such as hostium "of the enemies". A common feature of Latin is hyperbaton , in which a phrase is split up by other words: Sextus est Tarquinius "it is Sextus Tarquinius".
In old Latin, a form of the subjunctive with -s-, known as the sigmatic aorist subjunctive, is preserved (faxim, servāssim etc.). One use of this is for wishes for the future: [17] dī tē servāssint semper! (Plautus) [51] 'may the gods preserve you always!' deī faxint ut liceat! (Cicero) [52] 'may the gods ensure that it be allowed'
A difference from English grammar is that in open future conditions, it is usual in Latin to use one of the future tenses, when English has the present tense. [ 7 ] Apart from the types mentioned below it is also possible to have mixed conditionals, for example with different tenses in protasis and apodosis.
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