Talk:Latin conjugation

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It would be nice to have a more complete description of the standard conjugations here. --Tb 05:45 15 Jul 2003 (UTC)

Note that the similarity between English is and Latin est is not a mere coincidence, but rather one of the consequences of them having a distant common ancestor

Are you sure about that ? Their common ancestor is quite distant (3000-4000 years) and most often used words change very fast. --Taw

Look in any etymological dictionary and you will see that it is correct. There are many other examples of Latin words which still resemble their English cognates (mater & mother, or sex & six, for example). Some words don't change much even over such long periods of time. --Zundark, 2001 Dec 6

That's right. The most commonly used words are actually the least likely to change, because they are used so often that changes to them can cause catastrophic misunderstandings. It's thought that the Northwest Caucasian languages diverged from the Indo-European languages about 10,000 to 12,000 years ago, and Ubykh (Northwest Caucasian) and English (Indo-European) still share a couple of cognates, notably t'q^w'a, two. To use another example: It's not likely that the word can't (I know, originally two words, but now it's basically just one word) would begin to be pronounced with the short vowel of duck, even though that phonetic change is very slight. I won't explain why; the page would get pulled down. :S thefamouseccles 00:52 13 Oct 2003 (UTC)

The closest relations in English (not counting direct borrowings) are borrowings from Old French, I'm pretty sure. By the way, why is there a stub message in here? The article is way too long to be a stub, I think. - Gwalla 22:47, May 11, 2004 (UTC)

My 2 cents re common words. It is the most common words that change the most. Just look at the verb 'to be' in Latin, French, Spanish, and Italian. Then look at another less frequently used word like 'city', for example: city, cite', ciudad (dad in Spanish is the same as 'ty' in English), citta. If you don't like that try, felicity, felicite', felicidad. They are a lot easier to pick out as the same words than I am, ego sum, je suis, yo soy, and io sono. Pronouns and commonly used adverbs and conjunctions seem to change faster than anything. Father and mother are special words, which is why they don't change as much but still they change more than less used words. NB This is a purely subjective comment based on personal experience with language and not meant to be in any way definitive or quotable.

It is certainly true that the forms of 'to be' are irregular; but that's because these are all Indo-European languages, not because 'to be' is a common verb. The etymologies are perfectly clear, in fact, and happen often because a phonological change forces disambiguation and then forms are borrowed from other related verbs. For example, why is "eres" there? soy, es, somos, son, these are all regular formations from the old athematic pattern. Well, Spanish turned Latin's T ending on 3rd person verbs into D, and then later dropped it, so you get "tenet" -> "tened" -> "tiened" -> "tiene". (The E -> IE change is a regular palatalizing rule in Spanish.) But est doesn't have a vowel before the T (because it's the athematic pattern) so it became just "es" right away with no stop at "esd". Latin's "es" (2nd person) would then get confused. So people simply borrowed the Latin future "eras" to serve, and eventually that became regular, under the form "eres".

This page is one the one hand very long and complex because of the tables and because it bizarrely includes the entire text of its former stub article at the end, and on the other hand seriously incomplete because it's missing three conjugations and discussion of irregular verbs. I've sliced out the stub text that was duplicated in the tables, but it is likely that this will need to be separated out into separate pages for each of the different conjugations, with brief descriptions and a link to each from this page. - courier

How could we seperate the page, and which verbs do we need to conjugate? - ChristopherWillis

Contents 1 Tables anyone? 2 Duplicates 3 This page 4 New Tables 5 Portandī can mean "of loving." 6 Third Conjugation 7 Fourth Conjugation

[edit] Tables anyone?

Just a thought: maybe prudent use of tables could greatly improve the overall clarity of this article. Apart from that, I am also able to reproduce the forms of ferre from my "stock knowledge" (and I can check using my notes). Also I think it might be a sensible idea to add the Latin names of the various forms. They are sometimes a bit different and still in widespread use. Valete, Shinobu 21:17, 2 May 2005 (UTC)

StradivariusTV has tabulated part of this article and I think it looks much better. If no outcries against this are heard then I (or someone else) will tabulate this whole article (the bits where tables are useful that is). Shinobu 11:37, 21 May 2005 (UTC)

If you look into the history of this article and its historical snapshots, it used to be tabular until little more than a year ago. It was finely formatted, with diakritics and boldface emphasising suffixes. Then it was explicitly converted to the most simplistic list form:

15:21, 22 October 2004 Poccil (→Conjugation tables - replace with list)

In fact, this is my first visit to this page, and I know of no history of what was happening here at all (and this page, as you see, keeps no records). First thing I saw was how much better the table looked than the lists; I dug down the page history out of pure curiosity.

I have not a glimpse of a hint of an idea why the flattening was done. I can try to contact the user User:Poccil who made this change, but I wanted to ask here first, in hope that anyone is around from back then who knows why the tables were ditched. Otherwise, there is a risk of investing into new tabular formatting and then having to scrap it — yet for the same mysterious reason. (personally I would have resurrected the old format) —66.92.34.249 21:35, 9 September 2005 (UTC)

I don't know why he did that, but I can make a wild guess: Suppose he clicked edit, saw an HTML table, and one that used a most horrible size fixing thingy, he either decided he didn't like that, or that he didn't like HTML (the "it should all be wikitext" argument). Not knowing wikitext table syntax he just axed it. I've added the difflink to your reference. That way it's easier to check if anything has been lost. These are his combined edits: diff. The current version uses wikitext tables and shouldn't offend Poccil, I hope. Shinobu 07:01, 24 November 2005 (UTC)

I really don't mind the switch to tables; it turns out to be neater in the end. Peter O. (Talk) 06:59, 27 September 2006 (UTC)

Ressurrect the tables! The lists are eyesores. They just look like arbitary Latin words strung together. The tables are divine. Rintrah 13:57, 4 October 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Duplicates

Similar conjugation tables can be found at Latin grammar. Shouldn't we (re)move one of these? I have changed the tables, but feel free to revert if the linear format is better. Googlpl 22:02, 19 November 2005 (UTC)

[edit] This page

I've just replaced the old table with a very ugly table generated in Excel on the principle that it's better to be accurate than to look nice. If anyone can improve either table it would be really good. I'll try to but I've not got much time and this isn't exactly something I know much about. Once we have an attractive and accurate standard we need to start moving the other conjugations over to the tabulated style. I've also removed lots of duplicated information. I'd like to remove the word "radical" - I've only ever seen it for "root" in things written in French and things translated from foreign languages so I don't think it's standard but perhaps I'm wrong - can anyone elaborate?--Lo2u 20:45, 14 July 2006 (UTC)

[edit] New Tables

I am making new tables for the conjugations. Previously, I had used different tables from this topic. Now, I have borrowed and altered the tables from the Spanish conjugation topic.

Also, will someone please remove the irregular verbs here, and create another topic titled Irregular Latin Verbs so that he put them there. Thanks. --Blurrzuki 20:53, 17 July 2006 (UTC)

Hi, that's some really impressive work you're doing. I've wanted to do that for ages and just haven't got round to it. I hope you didn't mind me replacing your table - couldn't work out how to put another column in and I knew you could get the old one in the history to work on. To be honest I'm not sure splitting the page is a good idea - some people still want to merge this with other Latin grammar pages and we'd probably find a merge notice within days. Also irregular verb conjugations are still conjugations so kind of belong here. In order to split we'd have to move this page to something like "Regular Latin verb conjugations" and turn this into a disambiguation page, which may be more trouble than it's worth. --Lo2u ^{(T • C)} 21:41, 17 July 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Portandī can mean "of loving."

Really? As a novice, IMMHO, "amandi" means "of loving", and so "portandi" would mean "of carrying" or so. -- Leendert Meyer, 23:39 13 august 2006 (CEST)

Fixed. Stupid of me... Amāre and portāre tend to be the friendliest verbs, and I had confused the two throughout editing. I just didn't catch that one. Thanks for bringest this to attention. —Blurr_zuki t - c 21:36, 13 August 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Third Conjugation

What does this mean: Their principle parts are all irregular? I know what the principal parts means, but not what "irregular" means in relation to it. I am trying to learn present, perfect, and future tenses for third conjugation verbs, in active, indicative form; but there are so many variations that its so difficult to group them easily for my purposes — e- stem, o-stem, and that other paradigm. Declensions were easier to learn.

Just remember that the perfect, pluperfect and future perfect always use the same method regardless of a verb's conjugation. Just remove the -ī on the third principal part and so on.—Blurr_zuki t - c 23:49, 4 November 2006 (UTC)

Someone needs to change all the "principle"s erroneously used as adjectives to "principal"s. Rintrah 12:27, 2 October 2006 (UTC)

Done. Shinobu 09:42, 16 November 2006 (UTC)

I resolved my conjugation problem, but can someone please answer the question?

I haven't god a clue what it means, but, if it's any comfort, it's not in the article anymore ;-) Shinobu 09:42, 16 November 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Fourth Conjugation

There are some mistakes in the fourth conjugation that I would like to correct, but I don't know how to generate a macron (long vowel mark) in Wikipedia. Can anyone tell me how?

• Below the editing text box, you can find a large group of characters that you can input into the text box by clicking on them.—Blurr_zuki t - c 23:46, 4 November 2006 (UTC)