Latin has six main tenses: three non-perfect tenses ( the present, future, and imperfect ) and three perfect tenses (the perfect, future perfect, and pluperfect).
| Ending Person Latin | – isti you (singular) audivisti | -it he/she/it audivit | -imus we audivimus | -istis you (plural) audivistis |
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RULE 1: – bi- (seen sometimes as -bo- and -bu-) is the future tense sign. RULE 2: -ba- is the imperfect tense sign. Note that Latin verbs reverse the order of components seen in English verbs. LATIN: base/meaning + tense sign + person/number marker (e.g. serva+bi+t);
Latin has only the above six tenses . As you can see from the translations provided, there are not as many different ways of describing actions in Latin as there are in English!
| Pluperfect tense endings | Latin English | – eratis you (plural) | -erant they |
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MOOD: Latin has four Moods: Indicative, Subjunctive, Imperative, Infinitive .
The Proper Conjugations of Esse
Sum is the present indicative tense of the verb esse, meaning “to be.” As with many other living and dead languages, esse is one of the oldest verb forms in Latin, one of the most frequently used of the verbs, and one of the most irregular verbs in Latin and related languages.
Modern grammarians generally recognise four conjugations, according to whether their active present infinitive has the ending -āre, -ēre, -ere, or -īre (or the corresponding passive forms), for example: (1) amō, amāre “to love”, (2) videō, vidēre “to see”, (3) regō, regere “to rule” and (4) audiō, audīre “to hear” .
| Present tense endings | Latin English | -t he/she/it (third person singular) | -mus we (first person plural) | -tis you (second person plural) |
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| Nominative nos we | Genitive noster of us, our/ours | Dative nobis to/for us | Accusative nos us | Ablative nobis by, with, from, (etc.) us |
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to what ?, to which? ( interrogative); dative singular of quī
When the verb was a compound of a separative pre-verb (ad, de, ex) and the stem, the dative was used when the sense in English suggested an ablative. For this reason, a special category of the dative with compounds is the dative of separation: absum tibi = I am absent from you ; extorta tibi = ripped from you.
The Spanish pluperfect tense describes a past action that happened before another past action . In other words, it is used to say what someone or something had done. For example: Nos habíamos acostado después de terminar nuestros deberes (We had gone to bed after finishing our homework).
