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A third type of periphrastic conjugation, which eventually developed into the perfect or pluperfect tenses in Romance languages such as Italian and French, is formed from the accusative perfect participle (ductum, ductam, ductōs etc., according to the gender and number of the object) combined with various tenses of habeō 'I have', for example ...
Thus all those Latin verbs which in the present tense have 1st singular -ō, 2nd singular -ās, and infinitive -āre are said to belong to the 1st conjugation, those with 1st singular -eō, 2nd singular -ēs and infinitive -ēre belong to the 2nd conjugation, and so on. The number of conjugations of regular verbs is usually said to be four.
Latin verbs have six basic tenses in the indicative mood. Three of these are based on the present stem (e.g. dūc-) and three on the perfect stem (e.g. dūx-). In addition, there are four tenses in the subjunctive mood, and two in the imperative.
In Latin, there are different modes of indicating past, present and future processes. There is the basic mode of free clauses and there are multiple dependent modes found exclusively in dependent clauses. [1] In particular, there is the 'infinitive' mode for reported satetements and the 'subjunctive' mode for reported questions.
Latin word order is relatively free. The verb may be found at the beginning, in the middle, or at the end of a sentence; an adjective may precede or follow its noun (vir bonus or bonus vir both mean 'a good man'); [5] and a genitive may precede or follow its noun ('the enemies' camp' can be both hostium castra and castra hostium; the latter is more common). [6]
The subjunctive (also known as conjunctive in some languages) is a grammatical mood, a feature of an utterance that indicates the speaker's attitude toward it.Subjunctive forms of verbs are typically used to express various states of unreality such as wish, emotion, possibility, judgment, opinion, obligation, or action that has not yet occurred; the precise situations in which they are used ...
The subjunctive is also used if the clause is part of indirect speech. In the following sentence both verbs are in the historic present tense, the first one subjunctive: cum prīmum possit, in Venetōs proficīscī iubet (Caesar) [108] "he ordered him to set out for the Veneti as soon as he could"
The subjunctive foret (derived from the future infinitive fore), can sometimes be used in the protasis instead of esset to refer to a future situation in indirect speech (see Latin tenses#Foret): usūrum sē eōrum operā sī bellum cum Veientibus foret (Livy) [168]