Parts and Labor
The concepts you have learned so far in this chapter have shown you the multitude of things that are encoded in a Latin verb. Keeping those things in mind, it's time to leave the realm of theory and take a peek into the world of practice. Since Latin verbs are constructed of bits and pieces, it will be helpful for you to learn about the raw materials you will have to work with before learning how to build them.
Principal Parts
Native speakers of English, not to mention those learning English as a second language, have drilled into their heads what are called principal parts of verbs: “go, went, gone”; “sing, sang, sung”; and the notorious “lie, lay, lain” versus “lay, laid, laid.” Those sequences represent the present tense, past tense, and past participle forms of a verb.
Participles are adjectives made from verbs. English has two participles. There is a present participle that contains the continuous aspect idea (e.g., “breaking”), and a past participle for the completed aspect (e.g., “broken”). Read these three short sentences and this will be easy to see: The cup is red. The cup is breaking. The cup is broken.
Latin has its own system of principal parts. In Latin, though, there are four, and they follow a somewhat different pattern than the principal parts of an English verb do. Their reason for existence, however, is the same. Once you understand what the principal parts are, you will have all the basic information you will need about a verb to put it into any person, number, tense, mood, or voice.
Let's use the principal parts of the Latin verb for “give, gave, given” as an example to explore what these parts are all about.
dō, dare, dedī, datum
dō (“I give”) is the first person singular, present, indicative, active. It tells you whether or not a verb is an -iō verb. (More on this very soon!)
dare (“to give”) is the present infinitive active. It provides the present stem and shows to which conjugation a verb belongs. (This comment will make sense soon, too.)
dedī (“I gave”) is the first person singular, perfect, indicative, active. It provides the stem for perfect system forms.
datum (“given”) is the “supine.” It has special uses, which we will talk about in detail later. It also supplies the base for certain participial forms.
The principal parts of a verb provide you with all the information you need to construct or recognize each and every possible form of a verb. The first two parts provide “need to know” information for making present system forms, and the last two have information for the perfect system. In the next chapter you will be working with tenses formed from the second and third parts. The first and fourth principal parts will each have their own chapters later.
When you learn verbs in your vocabulary, it's a good idea to learn all four principal parts, even if you don't know what they are all used for yet. If you don't, when the time comes for you to learn what those mysterious principal parts are used for, you'll have to go back and relearn all your vocabulary.
Even though you won't be working with the first principle part fully at the moment, it still has an important role for you. First of all, it is the only way to tell whether a verb is an “-iō verb.” Also, Latin dictionaries list verbs by their first principle part, so you have to know them in order to look a verb up in the dictionary, or at least be able to predict how a verb's principal parts might go. (There is a rhythm to them and you will catch on to it over time.) Since a Latin verb can appear in as many as almost three hundred different forms, a dictionary that had separate listings for every form of every verb would be enormous!
The Conjugations
If a well-shuffled deck of cards were handed to you and you were asked to sort them into a few groups based on common characteristics, what would you do? Odds are you would go by suit, putting the spades in one pile, the hearts in another, and so on. Scholars have done the same thing with Latin verbs. All verbs are divided into groups called conjugations.
Not counting a few odd verbs — the jokers in the deck — that are called the irregulars, there are four of these conjugations. They are distinguished by their second principle part (the infinitive) and have the uninspired names “first,” “second,” “third,” and “fourth.”
All verbs with -ā re for their infinitive ending are “first conjugation”: putō , putā re, putā vī , putā tum.
All verbs with -ē re for their infinitive ending are “second conjugation”: videō, vidē re, vī dī, vī sum.
All verbs with -ere for their infinitive ending are “third conjugation”: dī cō,dī c ere, dīxī, dictum.
All verbs with -ī re for their infinitive ending are “fourth conjugation”: veniō, venī re, vē nī, vē ntum.
There is another group of verbs called third conjugation -iō verbs (e.g.,faciō , facere, fēcī , factum). Their infinitive ends in -ere, so by the rules, they are third conjugation. Their first principle part, however, ends in -iō like fourth conjugation, and almost all their forms look the same as those of fourth conjugation verbs.
Second and third conjugation verbs are tricky to recognize at first glance — they each have an -e- in their infinitive. For second conjugation verbs, the -ē- is long (notice the macron). For third conjugation, the -e- is short. This may seem like a trivial detail right now, but you will see soon that it is actually quite huge!
Knowing to which conjugation a verb belongs is very important for recognizing and forming the present system tenses. How a verb forms its present and future tenses depends on its conjugation. Of the three tenses in the present system, the imperfect tense is the least affected by the differences among the conjugations. You will learn the imperfect tense formally in Chapter 4. The present and future tenses will be introduced in a later chapter.
The word “conjugation” can be confusing. Sometimes it refers to a classification, as we've been using it here. It can also refer to a chart that shows all the forms of a verb in a certain tense. To “conjugate” means to make a chart like that.
You will be glad to know that all the perfect system tenses behave themselves: All their forms are made the same way regardless of conjugation. Not even the irregular verbs stray from this rule!
