“First and Second Conjugation Verbs: Indicative, Imperative, and Infinitive”
VERBS: THE BASICS OF CONJUGATION
Let’s start simply: a verb is a word which indicates action or state of
being. Everyone ought to know that. Look at some of the different forms of
a simple verb in English, the verb “to see”:
| GROUP I | GROUP II | GROUP III |
| I see. I do see. I am seeing. I will see. I should be seeing. I would see. See. I want to see. | I saw. | I am seen. I was seen. I will be seen. I should have been seen. |
And so on; there are several left out. Look at the first group for now. You
can detect something interesting going on here. You have a basic form of
the verb — “see” — and it’s undergoing changes. One kind of change is that
different words are put before it, another is the “-ing” suffix attached to
the end, and another is the addition of a suffix “-s” when you want to say
“he/she/it sees”.
You can see that the verb “to see” has a basic form, which is being
modified slightly to show that the verb is being used in a different way.
This modification of a verb to show different aspects or conditions of the
action is called “conjugation” (kahn juh GAY chion), and a verb is said to
“conjugate” (KAHN juh gate) when it’s modified to exhibit these different
conditions. A verb, therefore, has a basic form or set of forms, which then
conjugate in order to change the way its meaning is to be understood in a
particular context. These basic forms contain the core meaning of the
verb, but the way the action is being applied and the circumstances under
which the action is changing.
Now look at the second group — it’s really a group of one. Here you
have an entirely different form: “saw”. How do you know that it’s a part of
the verb “to see?” From your experience with English, of course. This form
of the verb is an entirely different stem, yet it’s still just a variation of
the basic verb “to see”. So a verb can change its form entirely and still be
a part of the same family of meaning. So also with the third group. “Seen”
is another stem of the basic verb “to see”, and your native English sense
tells you it’s merely a variation of a verb you already know: “to see”.
Again, we can put all kinds of words in front to conjugate it, but with this
stem, no changes actually affect the stem itself. There’s no such form as
“seening”, for example.
Now let’s try an experiment. Suppose you’re not an English speaker
and you come across the word “saw” while you’re reading something. You
don’t know what it is, so you try to look it up in the dictionary just as it
is: “saw”. Unless you have a very unusual dictionary you won’t find it. Why
not? Because “saw” is a variation of a more basic form. In the same way,
would you expect to find an entry in a dictionary for the word “stones?” Of
course not, because “stones” is just the plural form of “stone”, a form you
can easily deduce from the basic form “stone”, if you know the rules of
English grammar. So before you can use a dictionary, you already have to
know something about the language. And that’s entirely understandable.
How big would a dictionary have to be to list all the possible varieties of
every word in the language? Consequently, before you look up a word in a
dictionary, you must first reduce it to a form under which the dictionary
will list it, and that often takes patience and some mental effort.
Let’s go back to the verb “to see”. It has three different stems in its
conjugation — “see, saw, seen” — and to use the verb intelligently you
must know them all and you must know the rules governing their use. We call
these forms, the “principal parts” of the verb. You’ll notice in English the
way these principal parts are conjugated is by piling up all kinds of words
in front of them. These words change the aspect of the action. To sum up,
to use any verb fully, you must know two things: (1) all the principal parts
of the verb, and (2) the rules governing the conjugation of English verbs.
This is also true of Latin verbs.
LATIN VERBS: THE BASICS
As you may have guessed, Latin verbs have different rules governing the
way they conjugate. For the most part — almost exclusively — Latin
verbs conjugate by attaching endings to the stems themselves, without all
the separate helping words put in front of the stem as in English to tell
you how to understand the action. So for a Latin verb, you must learn two
things: (1) the stems, and (2) how the stems are modified at their ends to
show different conditions under which the action is occurring. Let’s look
at English again. Here is the conjugation of the verb “to see” in the
present tense.
SINGULAR PLURAL
I see we see
you see you see
he, she, it, sees they see
With the exception of the form “sees”, the differences among these forms is
made by the preceding word. In this instance, the change is in the person
who is performing the action. Now look at the Latin translation for the
verb English verb “to see” with these modifications.
LATIN ENGLISH
1st video I see
2nd vides you see
3rd videt he/she/it sees
1st videmus we see
2nd videtis you see
3rd vident they see
As I told you before, Latin conjugates its verbs by attaching endings to
the root of the verb itself, and here you can see it happening. The common
feature of the verb "to see" in Latin is the stem "vide-" and to show
changes in person and number, Latin adds a suffix. These suffixes are
called the "personal endings", because they indicate the person and the
number of the conjugated form of the verb. Let's set these personal
endings out:
CHAPTER 1
1st person -o = I
2nd person -s = you (singular)
3rd person -t = he, she, it
1st person -mus = we
2nd person -tis = you (plural)
3rd person -nt = they
Now try your hand at conjugating some other Latin verbs. The verb
meaning "to warn, advise" in Latin has the stem "mone-"; the verb meaning
"to be strong" in Latin has the stem "vale-"; and the verb meaning "to owe,
ought" in Latin has the stem "debe-". Translate the following into Latin.
we owe, ought debemus
they see ____________________
she advises ____________________
you (pl.) are strong ____________________
they warn ____________________
you (sg.) are strong ____________________
I owe, ought ____________________
we see ____________________
CONJUGATIONS OF LATIN VERBS
You now know the single most important characteristic of Latin nouns: they
conjugate by adding suffixes to a stem. You also now know the most common
kind of suffix: the personal endings. Next you need to know something more
about the stems. There are four groups of Latin verbs, called
"conjugations", determined by the final vowel attached to the end of the
stem. The verbs you've been working with have stems which end in "-e".
Verbs whose stems end in "-e" are called "2nd conjugation" verbs. If,
however, the stem of the verb ends in "-a" then it's called a "1st
conjugation" verb. Verbs whose stem ends in short "-e" are called "3rd
conjugation". And verbs whose stem ends in "-i" are called "4th
conjugation". Like this:
1st 2nd 3rd 4th
lauda- vale- duc- veni-
ama- vide- ag- senti-
cogita- mone- carp- audi-
The first several chapters of Wheelock are concerned only with the first
and second conjugations, so for now we'll postpone any further discussion
of the third and fourth conjugation. But for now, you need to recognize
that the principal difference between the four conjugations of Latin verbs
is in the vowel that comes between the stem and the personal endings. All
four conjugations follow the same rules for conjugating: stem (which
includes the characteristic stem vowel) + personal endings.
You have already worked with second conjugation verbs. Now let's
have a look at an example of a first conjugation verb. We'll use the verb
"to love" as the example, which has the stem "ama-". So "ama-" means "love"
but to use it in a sentence, we have to add the personal endings. The
stem of the verb is "ama-", so to conjugate it, we just add the personal
endings to it, following the same rules that apply to second conjugation
verbs. Fill in the stem and personal endings in the blanks on the following
chart but hold off filling in the conjugated forms for now.
STEM + PERSONAL ENDING = CONJUGATED FORM
1st ________ + __________ = _______________
2nd ________ + __________ = _______________
3rd ________ + __________ = _______________
1st ________ + __________ = _______________
2nd ________ + __________ = _______________
3rd ________ + __________ = _______________
Now for the conjugated forms. If you follow the rules of conjugation that
apply for second conjugation verbs, you should write the form "amao" for
the first person singular. But listen to how easily the two vowels "a" and
"o" can be simplified into a single "o" sound. Say "ao" several times quickly
and you'll see that the two sounds are made in the same place in the mouth.
Over time, Latin simplified the sound "ao" to just "o". The final written
form is "amo", not "amao". So write "amo" for "I love". Aside from this small
irregularity, however, the personal endings are attached directly to the
stem without any alteration or loss of the stem vowel. Fill in the rest of
the conjugated forms. (If you're unsure of yourself, check your work
against the paradigm on page 3 of Wheelock.)
Now conjugate another paradigm of a second conjugation verbs: "mone-"
STEM + PERSONAL ENDING = CONJUGATED FORM
1st ________ + __________ = _______________
2nd ________ + __________ = _______________
3rd ________ + __________ = _______________
1st ________ + __________ = _______________
2nd ________ + __________ = _______________
3rd ________ + __________ = _______________
THE ENGLISH PRESENT TENSES
Look at the following conjugated forms of the English verb "to see".
I see.
I am seeing.
I do see.
Each of these forms refers to present time -- and are therefore present
tenses -- but each is different. We're so accustomed to these different
present tenses in English that we can hardly explain what the different
meanings are, even though we're instantly aware that there is a distinction
being made. Try to explain the differences among "I see", "I am seeing" and "I
do see". It's difficult, but these different present tenses are essential to
the way we speak. In reality English is one of the few languages which has
these three present tenses, and it's very hard to foreign students of
English to learn how and when to use them. "I see" is called the Simple
Present tense; "I am seeing" is called the Present Progressive; and "I do
see" is called the Present Emphatic. Now try to come up with the
differences. The point of this is that Latin has only one present tense. So,
when we see "laudas", for example, it can be translated into English as "you
praise", "you do praise", or "you are praising". We have to let our native
sense of the simple present, the present progressive, and the present
emphatic tell us which to use.
THE IMPERATIVE
Another conjugated form of Latin verbs is the "imperative" mood, or the
direct command. Its name is its definition. It's how you turn a verb into a
direct command: "Look here", "Watch out", "Stop that", etc. To form the
imperative mood of any Latin verb, follow these rules:
Second Person Singular stem
Second Person Plural stem + te
Form the imperative mood of the following Latin verbs:
lauda-
singular ____________________
plural ____________________
mone-
singular ____________________
plural ____________________
THE INFINITIVE
Verb forms which specify no person -- 1st, 2nd, or 3rd -- we call "infinite"
or "infinitive", which means, literally, "without boundary". That is to say,
the form is not bounded by or limited to a certain person. Theoretically,
there are many verb forms which are "infinite", but in common usage the
word "infinitive" is generally limited to forms which are translated into
English as "to x" (where "x" is the meaning of the verb). To form the
infinitive, a "-re" suffix is added to the stem.
lauda + re = laudare (to praise)
mone + re = monere (to warn)
DICTIONARY CONVENTIONS FOR VERBS
As you can see, each verb has at least six different forms (there are many,
many more which you'll learn later), and, for obvious reasons, it would be
impossible for a dictionary to list all six of these possibilities under
separate entries. That is, you can't look up "laudant" just as it's here,
anymore than you could look up "they are saying" under "they" in an English
dictionary. You have to strip the conjugated form of the verb down to the
form under which the dictionary will give it to you. For the English "they
are saying", obviously, you would look up "say", because you know the
conventions an English dictionary uses for listing an English verb. What
are the conventions for a Latin dictionary? If you see a form like
"laudant" in a text you're reading and want to look it up, how do you do it?
What is its "dictionary" form?
The dictionary form for a Latin verb is not the stem, but the first
person singular. This means that when you want to look up "laudant" you
have to look it up under the conjugated form "laudo", not under its raw stem
"lauda-". What you have to do to look up a Latin verb, therefore, is to
imagine what the verb looks like in the first person singular and look it up
under that. There is no reason it has to be like this; Latin dictionaries
could have adopted any other of a number of different conventions for
listing verbs, but this just happens to be the way it is. A consequence of
this is that the first personal singular of a verb is considered to be the
basic form of the verb. So, I'll say, for example, "The Latin verb for "to
see" is "video", which is really saying "The Latin verb for "to see" is 'I
see.'" Again, this is just conventional, but it's how it's done. To repeat, in
order to look a verb up in the dictionary, you first have to reduce it to its
first person singular form. In the case of the conjugated form "laudant"
you would follow this process.
(1) The "-nt" suffix is the third person plural personal ending, so
you take it off; that leaves you with "lauda-".
(2) You remember that verbs conjugate by adding personal endings
to the stem, so "lauda-" is the stem. But you can't look it up
under the stem alone, because a dictionary lists verbs under
the first person singular. You must reconstruct the first
person singular to look this verb up.
(3) Next ask yourself what the conjugation of a verb like "lauda-"
is going to be, first or second conjugation? Since the final
vowel of the stem is "-a-", the verb you're looking at is a first
conjugation verb. And what does the first person singular or a
first conjugation verb look like? It's "lauda + o = laudo" (since
the "a" and the "o" contract to just "o"). So we say that
"laudant" is from "laudo", just as we might say in English "seen"
is from "to see".
(4) Now you've simplified the verb to something you can look it up
under -- "laudo" -- and the translation is "to praise".
(5) The second entry for a verb in the Latin dictionary is its
infinitive form. After "laudo", therefore, you see "laudare".
Since you know that an infinitive is the stem plus the ending
"-re", you can easily see the true stem of the verb simply by
dropping off the final "-re" infinitive ending. This confirms the
fact that the verb you're looking up is a first conjugation
verb.
(6) Now translate "laudant". With the personal ending brought back
in the translation is "they praise" (or "they are praising", or
"they do praise").
I know this may seem tedious at first, but concentrate on
internalizing each one of these steps. You'll benefit immensely when the
grammar becomes more complicated. The moral of all this is that you should
never go browsing around in the dictionary hoping to find something that
might match the word you're looking up. You must think carefully about what
you're looking for before you turn the first page of the dictionary. (You'll
hear me say this repeatedly.)
VOCABULARY PUZZLES
debeo, debere This verb has an apparently odd combinations of
meanings -- "to owe; should, must, ought" -- until we
remember that our English verb "ought" is really an
archaic past tense of the verb "to owe". As with the
English verb "ought", the Latin verb "debeo" is often
followed by an infinitive to complete its meaning: "I ought
to see" = "Debeo videre". An infinitive which completes
the meaning of another verb is called a "complementary
infinitive".
servo, servare Despite its appearance, this verb doesn't mean "to serve".
Be careful with this one.
12/31/92
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