Oh what a day! I just love a day like this - a conjugation day!

Looking at the future tense and reviewing our discussion yesterday, we spent our day focusing on the formation of the future tense. Here’s the great thing: almost every single one of you did this absolutely perfectly, right down to the last -ent!

Real Quick:

The future tense is, of course, the tense that:

The Latin Verb System handout that I gave you yesterday (graphic above) illustrates the conjugation-dependent nature of the future tense and its two sets of endings.

What we did with this was to simply look at ten verbs and, based on their conjugation, make the call where the identification of conjugation was concerned. We followed this by conjugating each verb according to the process outlined on the Latin Verb System handout.

Most of you breezed through the ten verbs on today’s worksheet without a single problem. Awesome! Those who had one or two problems found that the errors were very simple oversights and made the adjustments necessary to get this down. Again, awesome!

Here’s the key to these verbs, even though we had several willing volunteers writing them out on the Smartboard.

One Caveat:

Don’t get into a hurry when conjugating the future tense. I always did and found myself wondering why my conjugations didn’t seem to work out right the first time.

Take your time. Keep it together and get it done. Excellent!

We’ll be looking at future tense verbs in the context of sentences, working with them, translating them, etc. tomorrow.

Have a good one!

Today we spent our day with a quick review of the parts of a Latin verb for which we are currently responsible (stem, personal ending), after which we transferred the concept to sentences containing endings other than the -t/-nt we’ve had in previous chapters.

Our first order of business was to look at the parts of regular Latin verbs that we need to know right now. The stem offers us the base meaning of the verb, while the personal ending tells us the person and number of the subject. The following graphic is the way we laid it this out today.

I then gave you a verb review worksheet on which we pieced together all of the verb info we’ve had thus far. I’m pleased to say that the top half of the worksheet appears to be a piece of cake for almost all of you.

What we needed to work out is the second half of the sheet. We need to transfer the information from the top into a different setting. We can deal with verbs out of context and identify all sorts of “stuff” about them. But, in Latin, we don’t always see verbs out of context. We typically see them in context - the context of a Latin sentence.

The thing that appears to be a rather great temptation is to forget the personal endings and try to translate sentences as we’ve seen them for seven chapters. We cannot do this! We’ve got to look at all verbs, in the context of Latin sentences, just as as looked at them on the top of our worksheet today (out of context). This is the only way we’re going to be accurate in translation.

That said, I know that there are a few who wanted to check their work this evening. So here’s the key for today’s worksheet.

We’ll be looking at this information within the context of sentences tomorrow. We’ll also be looking at the noun endings and their implications, which many seem to have forgotten.

The solar wind must have been particularly strong and done some sort of “memory wipe” to many in the area over break.

See you tomorrow!

Just before break, I told you that we would start working with the future tense after break. So today we hopped in our Delorean and went

Our Chapter 23 Objectives told us just where we’re headed for the next week or so. As I said earlier, conceptually-speaking, there is nothing new in this chapter. If we consider that the nominative is still the nominative, the dative still charts as an adverbial modifier and saepe still means “often”, we won’t be looking at any new concepts. We will, however, be looking at some morphological changes, thus, the future tense.

After I handed out our updated Latin verb system handouts, several of you noticed an immediate difference between the future tense and those which came before (the present, imperfect and perfect tenses).

The future tense is the only tense that has two sets of endings.

That’s right, two sets of endings. The sets, as we saw on our handout, are conjugation-dependent. We must know what conjugation a Latin verb is in order to form and identify the future tense correctly. This is also covered (reviewed) on the handout.

We spent our period looking at how this process of forming the future tense works and tomorrow we’ll be doing some more. Here’s the plan:

• To go over the Chapter 23 Vocabulary
• To receive full synopses of our tenses thus far, including irregular verbs, and
• To complete a worksheet that offers practice with forming the future tense,

I love anything having to do with Latin verbs! Don’t you??

It’s good to see y’all again! See you tomorrow!

It’s good to see you all again, well-rested and all in one piece after a very nice winter break. Yes, it was a nice break but a little more difficult to get out of bed hours earlier than I thought it would be. Clearly, I wasn’t alone in that. I always say that the best remedy for this is to just get back into it as if there were no break at all. So that’s what we did.

Our discussion today? Well, many of you needed a refresher on the topic of verb conjugation. So that’s what we talked about and worked with. Our focus was on the three skills that we looked at before break and we did so by looking at the post from December 9, parts of which I’ll just repost.

Conjugation

Conjugation has two definitions that we need to look at - two definitions that depend on one another. We need to define conjugation as both a system and as a category. Have a look:

Conjugation:

1. [system]: the process by which we change the spelling of verbs to reflect their person, number, tense, etc..
2. [category]: classification of Latin verbs with similar features into one of five categories (1st, 2nd, 3rd, 3rd-io and 4th conjugations).

Conjugation as a Category

Latin verbs fall into one of five different categories: the 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 3rd-io or the 4th conjugation. How does this work? In order to determine to which conjugation a verb belongs, we need to look at the given verb’s infinitive form:

the letter before the -re determines a verb’s conjugation

The following table illustrates the details of this idea:

What is the table saying?

This table is saying that verbs with an “a” before the “-re” in the infinitive fall into the 1st conjugation, verbs that have an “i” before the “-re” in the infinitive fall into the 4th conjugation, etc..

The 3rd-io conjugation is the only tricky one. We need to look at both words of a dictionary listing in order to identify verbs of this conjugation. If the infinitive has an “e” (short “e”) before the “-re” and the first part has an “io” at the end, the conjugation is the 3rd-io.

The other purpose of the infinitive, when we consider conjugation is to find the stem of the verb (which provides the base meaning of a Latin verb), which we talked about on December 10. This leads us into conjugation as a system. The system of conjugation requires us to identify the stem of a Latin verb.

How do we find the stem of a Latin verb?

All we have to do to find the stem of the Latin verb is to remove the last three letters of the regular Latin infinitive (as The Latin Infinitive handout indicates).

Ok, so we have a base meaning, what about the endings?

Each Latin verb ending, as we reviewed today, is reflective of a specific subject (or lack thereof in the case of the non-finite ending). Have a look at this chart again:

The charts offer us some insight into the equivalency between Latin verb endings and English subjects. We spent the remainder of our time practicing this by simple drilling. I wrote a verb - you gave the person, number and subject.

This looks like an enormous amount of material. It kind of is. But it seems to have come back relatively quickly to most of you. We’ll be working with this again tomorrow in the form of a worksheet that will consolidate all of this down into exactly what you need to be able to do.

See you then!

Winter Break Rule #11:

No triple-dog dares… ever.

See you next year!