Latin/Perfect Tense Lesson 4

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.

New grammar
This lesson we continue with the Latin perfect tense, which is used to express action completed in the past. English present perfect and simple past are used where Latin uses perfect. Most verbs follow a very regular pattern in forming the perfect: take the stem from the 3rd principal part and add the endings
 * ī, istī, it, imus, istis, ērunt.

Even irregular verbs are pretty consistent. But the deponent verbs, which have a passive form but an active meaning, follow the rules for how the perfect tense, passive voice is formed for other verbs. We aren’t studying the passive voice yet, but this new set of forms is basically identical, and I hope it will make passive voice easier when we do reach it.

The perfect tense of deponent verbs is a compound of the 3rd and final principal part of the verb (which is the equivalent of the 4th principal part of a regular verb) and a form of the verb sum in the present tense. The ending of the principal part must agree in gender and number with the subject (so use the nominative case endings), and the form of sum must agree in person and number. Therefore:

When a plural subject is a group of all men or a mixed group of masculine and feminine, the masculine plural ending –i is used. Only when the entire group is composed of feminine persons is the –ae ending used. Of course if a neuter noun is the subject, you need to use the neuter ending, although it makes a strange sentence with this verb:


 * Aedificium locūtum est. = The building spoke.
 * Aedificia locūta sunt. = The buildings spoke.

Practice
With these four lessons, we have had a good introduction to the perfect tense. There are of course many verbs we haven’t covered yet, but we can introduce them as they come up. Bonam fortūnam vōbīs optō!