Latin/Perfect Tense Lesson 3

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. The past two lessons have introduced several common perfect tense verbs. The nice thing about the perfect tense is that it is very regular, following the same rules even for irregular verbs. We’ll continue adding more verbs in today’s lesson. Remember that all perfect tense active verbs use the 3rd principal part as stem, and add the endings
 * ī, istī, it, imus, istis, ērunt.

The translation in English can be “subject verbed, subject has verbed, or subject did verb.” The most complicated part of the perfect tense is learning the 3rd principal parts of all the verbs, if you haven’t already. You will notice that with the verb eō and its variants, there are two acceptable forms for the perfect tense. In practical usage īvi was often shortened to īi and it appears both ways in the literature.

Practice
In the next lesson we’ll continue with more verbs, including the slightly tricky deponent verbs. Valēte et bonam fortūnam!