Latin Verbs

Verbs, from the Latin verbum 'word,' are the most basic part of speech, along with nouns. Verbs describe the action that is being completed and can be seen as the heart of a sentence.

Like many other parts of speech in Latin, verbs are highly inflected and do much more 'work' than verbs do in English and even the romance languages that derive from Latin. This means that there is a lot of information packed into a single word.In order to be able to organize all this information, Latin verbs are usually given in four principal parts. Each of the principal parts gives information on the nature of the verb and how to conjugate all the possible forms of the said verb. Thus a verb in the dictionary will look like this: amō, amāre, amāvī, amātum 'to love. The principal parts are as follows:

The purpose of all these principal parts and inflections is to show different pieces of information or characteristics. like many languages, Latin verbs exhibit five characteristics:

1. Person: who is the subject doing the verb and is categorized based on the speaker's point of view: 1st person, the speaker (I, we), 2nd person, the one being spoken to (you, you all), 3rd person, the person being spoken about (he, she, it, they).
2. Number: how many people are doing the action, either singular or plural.
3. Tense: the time the action occurred. Most genealogical records are in the past or the perfect tense.
4. Mood: showed the way the action or mode of the verb. This includes the indicative, stating facts; the subjunctive, stating opinions, wishes, hypotheticals, or desires; and the imperative mood, orders, and commands.
5. Voice: shows if the subject performs the action, active voice, or if the subject receives the action, passive voice.

Verb Conjugations

All Latin verbs exhibit all five of these characteristics; furthermore, verbs are divided into different conjugations. The first two principal parts of a verb are useful for identifying what conjugation a verb belongs to. It is important to be aware of the type of conjugation a verb belongs to in order to avoid misinterpreting some of the characteristics of the said verb. There are five different conjugations that exist in Latin:

1. First Conjugation: are verbs like amō, amāre, amāvī, amātum, 'to love,' and are identifiable by the -āre ending in the infinitive. This conjugation is very regular throughout its principal parts.
2. Second Conjugation: are verbs like maneō, manēre, mānsī, mānsum, 'to remain,' and are identifiable by the -ēre ending in the infinitive. It is extremely important to recognize the penultimate long 'e' as this differentiates it from the third conjugation.
3. Third Conjugation: are verbs like dīcō, dīcere, dīxī, dictum, 'to say,' and are identifiable by the -ere ending in the infinitive. Notice that, unlike the second declension, the third conjugation has a short 'e.' It is the only verb conjugation to have a short penultimate vowel.
4. Fourth Conjugation: are verbs like audiō, audīre, audīvī, audītum, 'to hear,' and are identifiable by the -īre ending in the infinitive.
5. Irregulars: are verbs that do not fit in with the other conjugations. There are not many irregular verbs, but the ones that are are often very important such as sum, esse, fuī, futūrum 'to be.'

To anyone who has taken Spanish or another Romance language, these verb endings will look familiar. As Latin changed into Vulgar Latin and then into modern romance languages, the short 'e' in the third conjugation shrank into an 'i,' combined with the fourth conjugation, and resulted in the -ar, -er, -ir verbs that they are today.

Active Verbs

Most verbs in Latin are used in the Active Mood. This is where the subject performs the action; for example, this sentence, "the doctor heals the man," the verb to see here is active because the subject, the doctor, is acting, healing in this case, on the object, the man. Within the active mood, Latin verbs conjugate to show different tenses to show the action through time. To show this, there are two systems: the present system, which uses the first principal part, and the perfect system, which uses the second principal part.

The present system uses the second principal part as its base to form the following tenses:

• The present tense: "The doctor heals the man."
• The imperfect tense: "The doctor was healing the man."
• The future tense: "The doctor will love the man."

The other system, called the perfect system, uses the third principal part as its base to form the following tenses:

• The perfect tense: "The doctor healed the man."
• The pluperfect tense: "The doctor had healed the man."
• The future perfect tense: "The doctor will have healed the man."

While verbs conjugate across these various tenses, the verbs reflect number and person fairly regularly. These are called personal endings. Since personal endings are present in nearly every sentence, it would be beneficial for any researcher working in Latin to memorize them. These are:

Thus if we take this with the verb, sānō, sānāre, sānāvī, sānātum 'to heal,' and conjugate it in the active present tense, it will look like this:

• "Ego sānō" > I heal
• "Tu sānās" > You heal
• "Is/ ea/ id sānat" > He/ she/ it heals
• "Nōs sānāmus" > We heal
• "Vōs sānātis" > You all heal
• "Eī/ eæ/ ea sānant" > They heal

Note that most records that family historians will read will be either in the imperfect, perfect, or pluperfect tenses.

Passive Verbs

Latin Verbs can also conjugate to become passive. While the subject performs the action with active verbs, with passive verbs, the object becomes the subject and receives the action. For example, the previous sentence, "the doctor heals the man," is in the active the same sentence in the passive form would be, "the man was healed by the doctor."

The passive mood conjugates in a very similar manner as the active verbs and forms the same tenses. The passive present system also uses the second principal part; thus, the only difference is the personal endings. These are:

Thus if we take this with the verb, sānō, sānāre, sānāvī, sānātum 'to heal,' and conjugate it in the passive present tense, it will look like this:

• "Ego sānor" > I was healed
• "Tu sānāris" > You were healed
• "Is/ ea/ id sānātur" > He/ she/ it was healed
• "Nōs sānāmur" > We were healed
• "Vōs sānāminī" > You were all healed
• "Eī/ eæ/ ea sānantur" > They were healed

Meanwhile, the passive perfect system is formed differently as it uses the fourth principal part combined with sum, esse, fuī, futūrum 'to be' for the perfect system. Thus the same verb conjugated in the passive perfect tense will look like this:

• "Sānātus sum" > I was healed
• "Sānātus es" > You were healed
• "Sānātus est" > He was healed
• "Sānātus sumus" > We were healed
• "Sānātus estis" > You all were healed
• "Sānātus sunt" > They (masculine) were healed

Since the fourth principal part is used for the perfect system, this means that the passive perfect system must also inflect gender to agree with the noun it acts on. This declension is the same as the 1 and 2 declension nouns. For example, notice how the verb declines with the words puella ('girl,' feminine), vir ('man,' masculine), and animal ('animal,' neuter):

• "Puella sānāta est" > 'the girl was healed.'
• "Vir sānātus est" > 'the man was healed.'
• "Animal sānātum est" > 'the animal was healed.'

Another feature of passive sentences, as you may have noticed in the previous example, is that they only require a subject and a verb. For example, in vir sānātus est "the man (subject) was healed (passive verb); this means that the actual doer of the sentence never needs to be mentioned, instead focusing on the who was receiving the action. However, in English and Latin, the actor can be added in a passive sentence. For example, with the previous sentence, "The man was healed," we can add the doer to the sentence by adding by the doctor to make, "the man was healed by the doctor.

To do this in Latin, one must use what is called the ablative of agent. This is done by using the preposition ā/ab 'from, by,' plus the doer or actor of a passive sentence. Also, note that the preposition ā/ab works like the English word 'a/an,' in that it is ā when the next word starts with a consonant and ab when the next word starts with a vowel. Now with these rules, we can make sentences like the following:

• "Vir sānātur ā medicō" > the man is healed by the doctor
• "Carnem mandūcāta est ab animalī" > the meat was eaten by the animal
• "Puellæ ab puerīs amātæ sunt" > The girls were loved by the boys

Passive constructions are very common in parish registers. Especially in entries like "he was born," "she was baptized," or "they were buried."

Deponent Verbs

Along with regular verbs that can be formed in the active and the passive, Latin has another class of verbs called deponent verbs. There are verbs that are formed and look like they are in the passive form but work like regular active verbs. For example:

"Sanctus Iacobus linguam latinam loquitur" > St. James speaks Latin.
"Senēs sequuntor fīliī suī" > The old men follow their children

It is important to recognize deponent verbs as they can cause confusion when translating. However, they are quite easy to form as they are conjugated like any other verb in the passive mood, but they must be read like verbs in the active voice. Furthermore, because they are only formed in the passive mood, they only have three principal parts: the first, second, and fourth. Thus in the dictionary, they look like this:

• Loquor, loquī, locūtum (dep.) > 'to speak, talk'
• Sequor, sequī, sēcūtum (dep.) > 'to follow'

Participles

The last major form of verbs is participles. Participles are adjectives formed by the verb. An example of this in English can be seen in the phrase "the loving woman," here, the word 'loving' is an adjective used to describe the woman, having been formed by the verb 'to love.'

In Latin, most verbs have two active participles and two passive participles. The present active and the future passive participles are formed from the first principal part, while the perfect passive and the future active paticibles are formed from the fourth principal part. If we take the verb amō, amāre, amāvī, amātum 'to love' and make a chart out of its participle forms, it would look like this:

The reason that there are so many forms of the participle is because they each have their own connotation or meaning. These are:

• The present active: amāns, amantis = loving
• The perfect passive: amātus, -a, -um = loved, having been loved
• The future active: amātūrus, -a, -um = about to love, going to love
• The future passive: amandus, -a, -um = to be loved, that which ought to be loved¹

These concepts might be better understood if seen in their 'natural habitat.' Therefore in a sentence, these participles do the following:

If we now take these participles and attach them to a noun, we get the following:

• "Fēmina amāns" > a loving woman
• "Fēmina amāta > a loved woman/ a woman, having been loved,
• "Fēmina amātūra" > an about-to-be-loved woman
• "Fēmina amanda" > a woman to love/ a woman who ought to be loved
  

1. If we take the future passive feminine of this verb, we get the name Amanda, which literally means 'She who should be loved,' in Latin.

• Illumiation 1: Master of the Codex Manesse, Codex Manesse 311r Alram con Gresten, 1305-1315, in Codex Manesse (Zürich, 1305-1315) Cod. Pal. germ. 848, fol. 311r. This image is in the public domain.
• Illumiation 2: Master of the Codex Manesse, Codex Manesse 158r Der von Sachsendorf, 1305-1315, in Codex Manesse (Zürich, 1305-1315) Cod. Pal. germ. 848, fol. 158r. This image is in the public domain.