Verbs and syntax II: elements of endings

• Here's another look at the five elements of Latin verb endings, and the different possibilities under each. I'll use amo to take us through each of these elements in turn.
  
  • Person and number are straightforward enough. First person is the speaker (I or we), second person is the addressee (you), and the third person is someone else, a third party (he, she, it, or they). Number is something we already know from nouns and their kinfolk: I and he are singular, we and they are plural. Verbs have to agree in number with their subject nouns.

  • The Latin tense system deserves a bit more explanation.
    
    • Latin has six tenses, which relate to one another in a very clear way that you can see on this grid. The six tenses are present, future, and imperfect, and perfect, future perfect, and pluperfect. The two vertical columns mark the fact that each group of three tenses is formed from a different stem: notice that V in the stem of the perfect tenses of this conjugation. There's something parallel in English in the way all the tenses in the right-hand column use the auxiliary have. Within each column, there's one tense referring to the present, one to the future, and one to the past.

    • The slight odd one out here is the perfect tense, which is really two tenses in one: the past tense with have and the past tense without. It might seem odd to say the perfect refers to the present, but if you think about what you mean when you say "I have left your dinner in the oven", it means that the dinner's still there in the present, whereas "I left your dinner in the oven" implies that it was there once but isn't there any more. Latin tends to blur the distinction between these two ways of referring to a past action, one that's complete and one that extends into the present. But there are occasional situations when the distinction does matter.

    • Of the other tenses, present and future are self-explanatory. You use the imperfect to refer to a continuous or repeated or unfinished action in the past, as opposed to a single completed action: "I got rat-arsed in the Stumble every Friday" as against "I got rat-arsed in the Stumble last night". Future perfect is a little-used and slightly pedantic tense used to refer to action that's going to be in the past by the time you get to a point in the future: "I will have finished my essay by this time tomorrow". And pluperfect refers to action that was already in the past at a time in the past: "He had eaten two tubs of Haagen-Dasz by the time the pizza arrived."

    • So here's the full indicative active of amo to show you how all this fits together.
      

    • Notice again the way each tense has the sixfold rhythm that characterises grammatical tables in Latin: amo, amas, amat, amamus, amatis, amant. You can see how the red part of the ending, the part that conveys person, number, and voice, remains pretty much constant throughout the grid, with the same red ending turning up at the same position in most of the different tenses. Similarly, you can see that within each tense the blue bit in the middle remains pretty constant, just occasionally altering a vowel for phonetic reasons in front of a particular red ending. There's a couple of oddities in the perfect, but otherwise it's very regular stuff; and these endings are repeated across all four conjugations, with only the future acquiring a different set of endings in the third and fourth conjugations.

  • So that's the tenses. Let's now pass on to look at the slightly less intuitive notions of mood and voice, beginning with voice.