Questions tagged [perfect-tense]
The perfect-tense tag has no usage guidance.
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Perfect tense used to convey a planned action in the future
In Cicero's letters there is the following sentence:
In Cumanum hodie misi tabellarium. Ei dedi tuas ad Vestorium quas Pharnaci dederas. ("I am sending a courier to Cumanus today and I have given ...
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Is this a perfect passive infinitive with "esse" omitted?
The following sentence comes from lines 8-9 of chapter XXIII of Lingua latina per se illustrata. Familia Romana:
Tantum sciō epistulam Tūsculō missam et ā tabēllariō ad tē lātam esse.
I'm trying to ...
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What does "vestem scindebat" mean?
In LLPSI (CAP. XXV, line 111), Ørberg wrote the following:
multīs cum lacrimīs capillum et vestem scindēbat
I would have expected "vestem scidit", since the action of tearing clothes is ...
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To talk about repetitive past events (that used to occur regularly), do you use perfect or imperfect tense?
For example, how would you say "He used to come here every evening."? Would you say "Is hic venit quemque vesperem." or "Is hic veniebat quemque vesperem."? Or maybe ...
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Paradigm of (reduplicated) "fhefhaked"?
Do we have any reasonable speculations about a possible paradigm of archaic fhefhaked? I found an unreduplicated paradigm on Wikipedia, but I cannot judge its validity:
1st Sing. *fēkai
2nd Sing. ...
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1
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Is the perfect passive always formed like so: verb + sum/es/est?
I'm using Wheelock's Latin and in the chapter which introduces the perfect passive system I came across this sentence:
"Ubi haec tragoedia recitāta est, senex sententiīs iūdicum est līberātus.&...
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Why does quaeso have no perfect?
Apparently the word quaeso, to ask, has no perfect tenses. Why is this?
It would seem that quaeso is related to quaero, which does have perfect tenses. So for example, quaesiit, he demanded.
So is ...
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2
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Does suffero have perfect forms?
I read in "A Grammar of the Latin Language" by Karl Gottlob Zumpt that suffero has no perfect or supine because sustuli is for tollo. However I found perfect forms in online grammars. So, ...
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Is "Noli illud dixisse!" good Latin for "You should not have said that!"?
I am trying to understand how the perfect imperative functioned in Latin. Is "Noli illud dixisse!" good Latin for "You should not have said that!"? I know "Noli illud dicere!&...
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On the formation of perfect passive infinitives
I Think I understand why the passive infinitive of " amo " is not " esse amatus" : "being loved" is not perfect ( without any play on words).
So we need something else ...
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Why not future perfect in Jerome's Epistola 22?
In Jerome's Epistola 22 ad Eustochium, the famous one where God tells him that he (Jerome) is not a Christian but a Ciceronian, Jerome writes, after being whipped and then offered lenience if he won't ...
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What would the perfect stem of 'apparere' be?
Lewis and Short only give present stem forms of the verb appărĕre, appărio.
They say, quite rightly so, that it comes from ad+părĕre, and one would therefore expect the conjugation to be as that ...
- 111k
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Deponent verb participle gender
If we consider a deponent verb such as arbitrārī in the perfect tense, hence arbitrātus sum/es/est, is the participle arbitrātus supposed to be declined like a regular adjective? For example if one ...
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Did the Romans ever distinguish between present perfective and past aoristic?
The Latin "perfect" forms are a combination of two different tense-aspect combinations: past aoristic ("I ate"), and present perfective ("I have eaten"). The two are generally indistinguishable, but ...
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What verb forms εἴσηκται as 3 s pf m/p?
I’m certain the form εἴσηκται is 3rd sing. perfect M/P but can’t for the life of me come up with what verb this is. Does anyone recognize this? Is it a misprint, or am I forgetting something obvious?
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Relative sentence in the past
I'm trying to translate the following phrase into Latin:
I, who was earlier reluctant, was suddenly embarrassed and corrected.
So far I have managed to write:
Ego qui fui antea invitus, fui ...
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An unambiguous example of 'īt'
The regular perfect them form for "he went" is iit.
In an answer to this question about two short versus one long vowel, TKR mentions that this form can be contracted to īt.
In a text without macrons ...
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Is it better to memorize verb's 1st person perfect tense?
Is it necessary to memorize verb's perfect form like paro, parare, paravi?
Or can I predict a verb's perfect forms if I remember the rules by which perfect stems are formed. Like, the suffix -v/iv or ...
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Why "amatus est" instead of "*amavitur"
Is there any diachronic reason whereby synthetic perfective passive forms like *amavitur (and similar ones) are not possible and analytic forms like amatus est (and similar ones) are selected instead? ...
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The lexical root of the perfect tense forms differs from the lexical root of the infinitive form
Do the Latin have any other verbs, whose perfect tense forms base on the lexical root, that differs from the lexical root of the infinitive form (by analogy with the verb fero > tuli)?
user4768
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Is the U long or short in the forms ussi and ustus of the verb ūro?
I'm uncertain about the length of the u in the perfect and perfect passive participle stems of the verb uro /uːroː/.
My research
Lewis (1890) gives "ūrō ūssī, ūstus" but doesn't explain why....
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How do we know how -iī and -iit perfects were stressed?
The question Are there exceptions to the Latin stress rules? has an answer by Joel Derfner saying that the first-person singular perfect forms dormiī, audiī, veniī (for dormīvī, audīvī, venīvī) have ...
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Do contracted perfects have long or short vowels?
Many verbs have a suffix -v- in the perfect tense, which tends to disappear (or "contract" or "syncopate") before the ending: amā- > amāvisti > amāsti "you loved", audī- > audīvisti > audīsti "you ...
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Understanding the use of "regnavit"
Regnavit is the
third-person singular perfect active indicative of rēgnō
(Wiktionary)
Now, many times this word translated as if present, regnat, which is puzzling. For example, consider Psalm ...
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When did unsyncopated forms become archaic?
I'd always learned that the regular way to say "you loved" was amāvisti, with the "syncopated" version amāsti being poetic and uncommon.
However, Unbrutal_Russian says differently (with good ...
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Is the third person passive perfect of a verb a source of nouns, e.g. "benedictus" from "bendico"?
I always get confused with benedictus. It Christian prayers, it is found both as a noun and as a (passive) verb, e.g. benedictus est. When est is omitted (not uncommon in Latin, it seems), both look ...
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Why "dilatasti" instead of "dilatavisti" in Psalm 4:2?
(Psalm 4:2) cum invocarem exaudivit me Deus iustitiae meae in tribulatione dilatasti mihi miserere mei et exaudi orationem meam
When I called upon him, the God of my justice heard me: when I was in ...
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Latin usage & perfect passive finite verb forms
I understand that a perfect passive finite verb is formed by combining the perfect passive participle with the correct form of 'esse'. My question is this:
Does it ever happen that the second ...
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Is there an aoristic-perfective distinction in the Latin perfect?
I have just recently learned that the perfect tense in Latin can serve also as an aorist tense as well as a perfect tense and that the perfect tense in Latin is simply the result of the original Proto-...
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Adhibeturne tempus perfectum/imperfectum aut presens cum de homine mortuo loqueris?
In English, when a person who is deceased is being discussed, specifically when ascribing an attribute, concept, thing, etc. to them with a copulative verb, the simple past is typically used. E.g:
...
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What is the origin of the active perfect indicative personal endings?
The active perfect stem conjugation in Latin resembles the conjugation of esse a lot, but I recently learned that it is likely to be a coincidence.
However, the active perfect indicative forms do not ...
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2
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Understanding 'percepset' instead of 'percepisset'
When looking at the L&S entry for percipio, I came across a surprising perfect form: percepset.
The contraction percepisset > percepset lookst similar to cogitavisset > cogitasset.
Are ...
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What combinations of tenses appear in periphrasis?
Periphrastic verb forms, specifically a participle plus an auxiliary verb, are very common in English ("I am writing now"). They also appear in Latin and Ancient Greek and a number of Romance ...
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Using two future tenses together
I was trying to translate something to Latin, and I ended up writing something that made me feel uncertain.
For the purposes of this question, I stripped all unnecessary content to focus on what ...
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2
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Does the perfect "faxit" have an optative sense?
A sentence in Corderii Colloquia 24,
ille spiritus bonus faxit.
is translated as:
May that good spirit grant it.
How does the pf ind come to have an optative sense here?
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Why are "esurivi" and "sitivi" used in perfect, but "hospes eram" in imperfect in the same context?
There is a fragment of Gospel of Matthew (in Vulgata):
(...), esurivi enim et dedistis mihi manducare, sitivi et dedistis
mihi bibere, hospes eram et collegistis me (...)
My question is: Why ...
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Do any Latin verbs use a temporal augment?
In Greek, past tenses are formed with "augmentation," e.g. present -> imperfect:
λῡ́ω > ἔλῡον
εὑρῐ́σκω > ηὕρῐσκον
Since we know that certain Latin verbs preserve perfect reduplication, I wonder: do ...
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What is the difference between present and perfect conjunctive in hesitation?
I recently said this in our chat room:
Ita crediderim, sed certus non sum.
A brief discussion ensued about my choice of tense.
I wanted to express hesitation, and my gut feeling says that the ...
- 111k
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Gender and number in medieval composite active perfect
I am not sure of correct terminology, but let me call the medieval perfect tenses like amatum habeo — as opposed to the classical amavi — the "composite active perfect".
One would expect ...
- 111k
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Latin for English "has been" + adjective?
I'm trying to say in Latin, "Our garden has been full of junk for three years" and I can't figure out what tense to put the verb in. In English, "has been" expresses present tense with perfective ...
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Why did Hieronymus choose to use Latin tenses that don't exist in Hebrew when translating for the Vulgata?
Nisi Dominus ædificaverit domum, in vanum laboraverunt qui ædificant eam. [psalm 126:1]
I am pretty sure that classical Hebrew has no future perfect tense, so how did Jerome arrive at his ...
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What is the origin of the 3rd-person plural perfect ending "-ēre"?
Laudavēre is an (apparently older) alternative to laudaverunt. What is the origin of this ending? Is it connected with any other known endings or affixes?
Clackson & Horrocks say it is from an ...
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Can I contract with an irregular perfect stem in v?
I know that if I have a regular first conjugation verb, I can contract some forms.
For example, amavisti and amaverunt can become amasti and amarunt, and I have come across such forms repeatedly.
Can ...
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Which verbs have reduplicated perfect stems?
Certain verbs, such as curro, have reduplicated perfect stems (such as cucurri). Other verbs, such as facio, fero had a reduplicated perfect stem in Old Latin (as seen on the Praeneste fibula) which ...
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Is there a semantic difference between the two perfect tenses in medieval Latin?
In medieval Latin active perfect forms started to use the auxiliary verb habere with perfect participle.
Thus amavi would be replaced with amatum habeo.
These two constructions must have coexisted for ...
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Contracted perfect and historical infinitive
The present infinitive is sometimes used as a predicate in a past tense sentence.
The use context is similar to praesens historicum.
My grammar gives two examples:
Nihil Galli respondere, sed in ...
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