General Grammar

What are Principal Parts?

Nouns, verbs, and adjectives have principal parts. All nouns, verbs, and adjectives are listed alphabetically according to their principal parts in all Latin dictionaries. The principal parts are used to obtain stems. Stems become the base of that word for its function.

Principal Parts of Verbs

There are four principal parts for most Latin verbs that help us form the various tenses and voices each verb can command.

1. The first principal part is the present active 1st person singular form. It usually ends in 'o'. First person singular means the subject is 'I'. Present Active is the tense. The word 'amo' therefore means 'I love', 'I am loving' or 'I do love'. Three English forms in ONE Latin word!
2. The second principal part is the present active INFINITIVE. This word is simply translated as 'to .....' such as 'amâre= to love'. But it is a very important word since it gives us the conjugation to which a word belongs and the root that one will use to form the rest of the present tense as well as the imperfect and future tenses. Don't get confused by the terms I am using, they will be discussed shortly.
3. The third principal part is much like the first but rather than the present active tense, it gives us the root for the perfect tenses merely by removing the 'i'. As it sits it is used much as the first principal part. 'amâvî' = I have loved, I did love or I loved...again three for one!
4. The fourth principal part is a verbal adjective. It is called the Perfect Passive Participle and will have many uses. The fourth part ends in 'us' and is translated as 'having been .....ed'. e.g. amatus - having been loved

In a dictionary you will see a verb written in any of these ways:

• amo, amâre, amâvî, amatus - to love, like
• amo, -âre, -âvî, -atus - to love, like
• amo (1) - to love, like

The "(1)" above indicates that the verb belongs to the 1st conjugation and that the principal parts will always be -âre, âvî, atus.

Conjugation

Just as a noun or adjective belongs to a family called 'declension' and verb also has a connecting family called conjugation. There are 4 conjugations in Latin. They are identified by the infinitive or 2nd principal part of a verb. The first and fourth conjugations are somewhat regular with only a few words that do not fit a pattern. The third is very irregular and needs a lot of attention when memorizing verbs of the third conjugation.

The following chart gives sample words in each of the 4 conjugations:

Stems

Principal parts of verbs can be used to find the stem of a verb:

• Present Stem - Drop the "-re" from the present active infinitive (second principal part).
• Perfect Stem - Drop the "-i" from perfect active indicative (third principal part).
• Perfect Passive Participle Stem - Drop the "-us" from the perfect passive participle (fourth principal part).

Stems are used in the formation of:

Tenses (active and passive voices; indicative and subjunctive moods)
Imperative mood (Present and Future; active and passive)
Infinitives (Present and Perfect active and passive, and Future active)
Participles (Present active, Perfect passive, Future active and passive)

Tenses

Tenses tell the time in which an action takes place.

There are six tenses in Latin.

1. Present tense - indicates present action- happening now
   e.g. I talk, I am talking, I do talk = narro
2. Imperfect tense - indicates a past action that may still be happening, an action that was recurring (happened over and over again)
   e.g. I was talking, I used to talk
3. Future tense - indicates an action that has yet to happen
   e.g. I will talk
4. Perfect tense - another past tense but this indicates an action that is finished.
   e.g. I have talked, I did talk, I talked
5. Pluperfect tense - indicates an action that took place earlier than recent past.
   e.g. I had talked - 'had' is always used as an auxiliary verb in this tense
6. Future Perfect tense - rarely used in English; most frequent with 'if' clauses.
   e.g. I will have talked...very awkward in English translation.

During Latin I you will work with only the Present, Imperfect, Future and Perfect tenses.
Note too that where Latin has but one form, English can have several!

^ Grammatica