Verbs and syntax I: the conjugations

• The great thing about the four conjugations of verbs, as opposed to the five declensions of nouns, is that the endings hardly vary at all from conjugation to conjugation. It's not like the nouns, where you've got a complete set of distinct endings to learn for each of the five declensions. For verbs, there's basically just one set of endings, and the thing that varies between conjugations is to do with how they fit on to the stem. There's one exception: the future tense comes in two different sets of endings, one for the first and second conjugations and one for the third and fourth. But otherwise once you've learned amo you already know the endings for the other three conjugations; all you need to remember is what they do with their stems. For this reason I'm not going to plod through all the conjugations in turn; I'll make the basic points about the structure of the Latin verb using amo as an example.

• As we saw earlier, Latin doesn't use the army of auxiliaries that make the English verb so complex. Everything is there in the ending - often even including things like the subject of the verb, when that would otherwise be expressed by a pronoun.
  

• The English verb is a complete pig's breakfast. You've got relatively few endings, but a smorgasbord of auxiliaries from which you can help yourself generously: he loves; I will love; you may be loving; they might have been being loved. Most of what's difficult about the Latin verb system isn't to do with the Latin at all but with getting your head round these ridiculous English expressions in translating them. Here's how Latin does all this in one word.
  

• There are three elements to a Latin verb, which are usually represented by separate words in English. The stem tells you what verb it actually is - love, drool, meditate, whatever - and sometimes a bit about the tense and voice, whether it's active or passive, present or past, and so on. The last element give you the person and number, corresponding to the English pronoun if there isn't a subject separately expressed in the sentence, and also tells you the voice, whether it's active or passive. And the middle bit gives you the essential information about tense and mood. Where English piles all this stuff on to the front of the verb, Latin sticks it all on the end - so not ntbuama, as it might be in some African languages, but amabunt.