TAKEN FROM LATINA ROSARII LESSON 4

So far you have learned that the ending of a Latin verb tells which person is performing an action. This is very helpful if you are translating a sentence that contains more than one verb. But before you can begin to add the endings, there is one more thing to learn about these very important Latin words.

Latin verbs are divided into four groups called conjugations. Each conjugation is denoted by a particular vowel, called a stem-vowel, which helps to create the correct form of the verb (the first person singular is the exception to this.) We will be looking at First Conjugation verbs in this lesson, and the vowel for this group is ‘a’ – that should be easy to remember as ‘a’ is the first letter of the alphabet.

Now that we know the personal pronoun endings and the correct stem-vowel, we have to find the verb stem. In most Latin vocabularies, verbs are given in the infinitive form. The infinitive form means, ‘to do’ something, e.g. judicare is an infinitive, meaning ‘to judge’.

To find the stem, we drop the -re, leaving us with judica-.

If we want to write ‘he judges’, we add the ending ‘t’ to judica which gives us judicat. If we want to write ‘we judge’, we add the ending ‘mus’ which gives us judicamus, and so on with all the personal pronoun endings.

Here is the entire present tense form of judicare, to judge, with its English translation below:

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To find out more about Latin grammar, click here.