Latin Grammar: Verbs, Part I: The Basics + Sum

Do you really know the nouns and adjectives?  Can you really tell the difference between dative and ablative?  What about comparative adjectives?  If not, don't sell yourself short: master the nouns and adjectives, then pick up the verbs later.

Verbs: The Basics + Sum

Verbs have this way of being superficially complex.  You've probably looked through the tables in the back of Wheelock's, and yeah, those tables go on for like 10 pages.  The linguistic terminology that gets thrown around just makes it seem worse.  Just remember that, though you may not be familiar with the terms, you already know how verbs work in English.  It's just a matter of getting the Latin context.  And all the tables?  Well, there are tons of consistent patterns that will make learning verb endings much easier than you may have thought.

When it comes to the terminology, though, I'm afraid there's no way around it.  But don't worry: we're covering all the basics first, and you'll find that it's actually pretty easy.  There are a number of grammatical conventions that are the same for all verbs.  That's what we'll be covering here: the difference between active voice and passive voice, for instance. Here's a full list, so you can keep track as we go:

Person = 1st, 2nd, or 3rd (think: "I," "you," "it")
Number = singular or plural (think: "I" vs. "We")
Voice = active or passive (think: "I did it." vs. "It was done.")

plus, in the next post:
Tense = when the action happens (think: present vs. future)
Mood = indicative or subjunctive (think: "I was." vs. "I might have been."), plus infinitive ("To Be") and imperative ("(You) Be").

Some of this may look unfamiliar or confusing.  Don't worry about tense and mood - we'll cover that next time.  I'll explain everything in detail as we go, and by the time we get to the confusing bits, it'll already make a lot more sense.  So, let's start with the beginning:

Person and Number

I'm sure you already know these from learning English grammar.  Person is all about who's doing the action.  If I broke the vase, the verb is first person.  If you broke it 2nd person; and if he broke it, 3rd person.  In English, we often attach pronouns to verbs to indicate person: again, I broke it, you broke it, he broke it.  In Latin, verbs don't have to carry around the pronouns.  Instead, the endings indicate person.  Take a look:

Person	Latin Ending
I	-o (or -m)
You	-s
He/She/It	-t

This means that every time I say that I'm doing something in Latin, the verb will end in "-o" or "-m."  And so on for the others.

Alright, so there are three "persons."  As you know, each has two numbers: singular and plural.  You have the singular endings above; now for the plural.  Our English examples become: We broke it, You (all) broke it, They broke it.  And these have standard endings as well:

Person	Latin Ending
We	-mus
You (all)	-tis
They	-nt

These six forms are going to be standard fare for verbs, just like the ten you see for nouns.  If you think this looks really straightforward, that's because it is.  As an example, here's the verb sum (I am) declined:

Sum (I am)	Sumus (We are)
Es (You are)	Estis (You (all) are)
Est (He/She/It is)	Sunt (They are)

You probably noticed that sum doesn't have the standard set of stems like most nouns do; don't worry, most verbs will have a consistent set.  Sum is actually irregular, but it's used so commonly that you really must learn it to learn your other forms.  That's because sum is actually part of some other verb forms.  Which leads us to...   

Voice

There are two main types of verbs that you'll be learning before you start Lingua Latina: Active and Passive.  You might remember these terms from high school, when we were taught that passive voice is some sort of forbidden grammar construct.  Let me jog your memory:

Active: "I broke the vase."

Passive: "The vase was broken."

When passive voice is used, the "doer" of the action is removed from the equation.  You'll notice that the emphasis of the sentence completely changes when this happens: using passive voice sort of draws attention away from the fact that I broke something.  This is because passive and active voice is all about changing the relationship between the verb and the subject.  The subject of an Active verb is the noun doing the action.  The subject of a Passive verb is the noun receiving the action.  This is an important distinction, because the person and number of the verb's subject is part of what determines the verb ending.

The standard Active endings for any given verb are the ones we covered above (-o/-m, -s, -t, -mus, -tis, -nt).    So in the sentence "I broke the vase," we know the verb is going to end in -o or -m, because "I" is the subject.  In the sentence "The vase was broken," the vase becomes the subject, so we know that we need the 3rd person singular form ("it"), and since it's Passive, we have the following standard endings to choose from:

	Passive	Active
I	-r	-o / -m
You	-ris	-s
He/She/It	-tur	-t
We	-mur	-mus
You (all)	-mini	-tis
They	-ntur	-nt

Here's a video to help illustrate.  He talks about tenses, but we won't be covering that until next week, so don't worry about the tenses unless you feel comfortable with everything else.


This is just a first look at endings before we really dive into verbs in the next post.  Don't worry about memorizing them just yet; I mainly wanted to emphasize that these two sets are, by themselves, the bulk of the verb endings.  It's not much, is it?

Once you feel comfortable with the basics, move on to Part II.  In the meantime, check out the additional resources below...

Further Reading:  To read about verb basics in Wheelock's, see Chapter 1.  For more information on person, tense, mood, and voice, check out this handout.  This may look like a short list, but we'll sweat the details next week.  Just focus on getting these concepts down first.

UP NEXT: Verbs, Part II: in which we learn about more Latin-specific grammar like verb tense.

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