Latin/Participles Lesson 3

Welcome back to Latin for Wikiversity!

This is the first new lesson since the course was migrated to Wikiversity several months back. This lesson will introduce the future active participle, and give a few examples of its use.

Future Active Participle
The future active participle is formed by adding the adjectival endings -ūrus, a, um to the stem of the 4th principal part (the perfect passive participle). So for example, the verb dō, dare, dedī, datus  (1) will have datūrus, datūra, datūrum as the base form of the future participle. Datūrus can be translated “about to give, going to give.” Note that some verbs do not have a perfect passive participle, and sometimes in its place as 4th principle part the future active participle is given:
 * sum, esse, fuī, futūrus; 
 * maneō, manēre, mānsī, mānsūrus. 

This participle can then be declined like any 1st/2nd declension adjective if it is modifying a noun, and it may be used with a form of the being verb to give the sense of something that will shortly happen or is going to happen, or that is intended to happen soon. This construction is often used to convey a sense of immediacy or inevitability. It is used instead of the regular future tense in much the same way we say in English "going to" verb, "about to" verb, "intend to" verb or "need to" verb, even implying "very soon" with some sense of urgency. Participles, since they are not the main verb of the sentence, must show tense by relation to that main verb. In the sentence:
 * Dormitūrus eram,

the verb eram is past – “I was about to sleep.” This indicates a past state of looking forward to a near-future event of falling asleep, but the whole sequence is in the past now.

In addition to its use with the being verb, the future active participle is used to form the future active infinitive:
 * portatūrus esse = to be about to carry;
 * futūrus esse = to be about to be.

You may remember from the lessons on the infinitive the “accusative with infinitive” construction. This is a very common construction in Latin, much less so in English, and will need a series of lessons in the future to clarify it. A token example or two will be given below.

New Sentences
Next lesson will introduce the ablative absolute.