Latin/Passive Voice Lesson 1

Salvēte omnēs! Welcome back to Latin for Wikiversity. Here you can peruse a new lesson in Latin, in a simple format. If you would like to catch up, you can find a directory of lessons, a classified vocabulary list, and Memrise courses at the links on the right.

If you have followed along in this course so far, we have learned active voice verbs in all six tenses of the indicative mood, active voice. (Present, imperfect and future tense make up the “present system”; perfect, pluperfect and future perfect make up the “perfect system”.) Now it is time to add the flip side of active voice, the passive voice.

Active voice comes from the Latin root
 * agō, agere, egī, actus = act;

the subject of the sentence is the agent, or actor, who performs the action of the verb. To help my students get this, I have them adopt a superhero pose. Passive voice comes from the Latin root
 * patior, patī, passus = suffer, allow;

the subject of the sentence is the “patient” who receives the action of the verb. I tell my students to mimic roadkill. Middle school students LOVE this, and if nothing else, I’ve helped them learn a valuable life lesson; generally it’s better to be active than passive. As a writer, you should use passive voice only when you want to focus on the action itself and what it does to the person/thing receiving it; otherwise your writing becomes weaker. But of course as a student it is something that needs to be learned.

If you remember how to conjugate deponent verbs, you already know the passive voice endings! Deponent verbs are verbs with an active meaning, but passive forms. They are introduced here:
 * In present tense: Deponent verbs, present tense.
 * In imperfect tense: imperfect tense 3.
 * In future tense: future tense 3.

These are the three tenses of the present system. The passive voice endings are
 * r, ris, tur, mur, minī, ntur

for all three tenses; in the imperfect tense, the connecting vowel (ā for first conjugation, e for 2, 3, and 4) is added to the tense sign –ba- followed by the endings.

In the future tense, 1st and 2nd conjugations have their connecting vowels, followed by the tense sign, which also undergoes some vowel changes so it ends up as
 * –bor, beris, bitur, bimur, biminī, buntur

3rd and 4th follow the pattern
 * –ar, -ēris, -ētur, ēmur, ēminī, entur

A pretty good conjugation chart can be found here although you may prefer macrons rather than umlauts over the long vowels. There are also charts at Wikibooks.

To indicate the living agent (the person or animal who does the action of a passive verb), use the “ablative of agent” = preposition ā / ab + the ablative. To indicate the non-living agent or means, use the “ablative of means” which is the ablative alone, no preposition. It may help to remember that people are more important than things; they get a preposition, things do not.

Practice
Next lesson, we’ll look at the perfect system of the passive indicative. Multa exempla dabuntur. (Many examples will be given.) Valēte et bonam fortūnam!