FORM OF VERBS

The previous chapter described both the varying forms of Latin nouns, grouped in sets called declensions, and their uses. This chapter does the same for verbs. What Latin nouns and verbs have in common is that they are inflected: the form of the word, with the variable, distinguishing part usually found at the end, tells how it is used.

The complete set of forms for a verb is called a “conjugation” (< con- “together” + jungere “to join”). Latin has four conjugations, that is to say, four (slightly) differing sets of verbal forms. Every verb belongs to one of those four conjugations; which conjugation it belongs to is a given in the language, as the declension is for nouns. The number of irregular verbs (that is to say, those falling outside the four conjugations) is tiny, a mere half dozen. Among the conjugations, moreover, regularity is demonstrably greater than among the declensions: three of the six tenses (times) of the indicative, for instance, are formed exactly the same for all verbs in the language, including the irregulars; the same is true for three of the four tenses of the subjunctive. (I'll explain indicative and subjunctive shortly.) In the history of the Indo-European languages, Latin's dramatic regularization of the verb forms must be accounted one of its noteworthy achievements. The Romance languages in some ways regularized the verb even more, and in some ways made it more complicated too.