19.05.24: review; eō, īre [3]; imperfect and future tense; spot the difference

Both of these tenses were covered in far earlier posts and reviewed recently.

[images #1 and #2] eō, īre in [i] the imperfect tense and [ii] the future tense. That’s what I saw when I started to learn Latin, and every grammar book will do the same.

As always, one of the challenges of Latin is that the words all look very similar, and it’s easy to misread them. But take it apart. What is it you need to look for?

Latin verbs are made up of ‘components’, just like a piece of electrical equipment. A Latin verb has three components and those three components do in a single word what an English verb sometimes needs to do in two, three or more separate words.

Take it apart:

īre: infinitive; to go

Remove the ending -re > ī- ; that’s the stem, like the stem of a flower. It looks odd to have a single letter stem, but that’s what it is: go i.e. [1] the base meaning of the verb

Latin then gives two further pieces of information: [2] the tense and [3] the person or thing that’s performing the action.

[2]

Either [i] Imperfect tense i.e. I was going, you were going etc. or I used to go etc. Latin uses the imperfect tense markers: -ba- / -bā-

Or [ii] The future tense markers: -bō / -bi- /-bu- I shall, you will etc. dosomething

[3]

Then the personal endings are added

-ō / -m: I

-s: you (sg.)

-t: he / she / it

-mus: we

-tis: you (pl.)

-nt: they

Examples:

[1] ī -ba-m │ I was going

[stem ī + │ imperfect marker -ba -│ + person -m (I) ]

[2] ī-bi-mus │ we will go

[stem ī + │ future marker -bi -│ + person -mus (we)]

[4] Follow the steps and try the match up exercise. The answers are below the exercise.

It doesn’t matter how you learn something as long as it works for you …

[i] The image of the ‘imperfect sheep’ … -ba-, -bā- ... is used by some people to remember the imperfect tense of almost every verb in Latin!

[ii] I remembered the future tense of two verb conjugations -bō, -bi- and -bu - by this rather odd book title!