Re: latin verb examples and tense meanings

At 22:36 13/01/00 +0100, you wrote:
>
>Ok.  The infinitives by themselves are not sufficient to distinguish, even
>with macrons (long marks) added; that's why Latin principal parts are give
>the 1st pers. sing. of the present indicative active, followed by the
>present infinitive active.  Infact all the synthetic tenses are formed from
>two verbal stems, one known as in 'infectum' which can inferred from these
>first two principal parts, and one known as the 'perfectum' which is given
>by the 3rd principal part.  There is also a fourth principal part, the
>supine, from which may be derived both the future active and the perfect
>passive participles; the latter is used with the verb 'to be' to form
>certain analytic passive tenses.
>
        In France, when you take Latin courses, you must learn five forms for each
verb (not that difficult: they are easily remembered when the verb is
regular, and they are sometimes very useful with heavily irregular verbs!):
1st person singular present, 2nd person singular present, infinitive, 1st
person singular preterite (what you call perfect), supine.
For a regular verb, it gives: amo, amas, amare, amavi, amatum.

>First the infectum.  It is only in the tenses formed on this stem that the
>conjugations differ.  Also, it is only in tenses (more often just the
>present) that irregular verbs "do their own thing".
>
        What do you mean? In my classes the main irregular verbs had
irregularities on the preterite, not on the present tense. We generally had
no problem learning present forms as they were nearly all regular, but
remembering the irregular perfectum radicals were a torture.

>Ray.
>
>
>
>=========================================
>A mind which thinks at its own expense
>will always interfere with language.
>                   [J.G. Hamann 1760]
>=========================================
>
>
                                                        Christophe Grandsire
                                                |Sela Jemufan Atlinan C.G.

"Reality is just another point of view."

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