Latin stream/Conjugations

In Latin, verbs are said to be conjugated. Conjugation is the method Latin uses to add the subject of simple sentences to the verb itself. This lesson will show how conjugations work.

Conjugations
In English sentences can be split into subject, verb, and object. An example of this is the simple sentence 'They love you'. 'They' is the subject of the sentence, the person, group or thing performing the action. 'Love' is the verb, the thing being done. 'You' is the object, the person, group, or thing that is being acted on. English normally follows the predictable pattern of subject, verb, object. As an exercise pick up any English book and try to identify the subject, verb, and object of some sentences.

A Roman faced with the sentence 'They love you' would be very confused as to who was giving the love, and who was receiving it. The reason for this is that Latin has a much more flexible word order than English. The information that is encoded in word order in English is encoded by changing the ending of words in Latin. This means the personal pronouns used in English ( I, we, you, they ) are merged into the end of the verb in Latin. The Latin word for love is conjugated below.

The part of the word to the left of the hyphen ( ama ) is called the stem of the word. The part to the right is called the end. All verbs are conjugated with more or less the same pattern so you don't have to worry about having to remember 6 times the number of words! The reason the first person singular does not look like it contains the stem is because the original word was "amao", but was shortened to "amo" after time. This has happened in all verb conjugations.

In our example sentence 'They love you' a third person plural is performing the action to the word we want is 'amant'. The word for you is 'tu,' and is declined to 'te' in the accusative (see Declensions), so the sentence 'They love you' could be written in Latin as 'amant te'. The following table demonstrates every conjugation of the word 'amo'.