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An English pluperfect tense is sometimes appropriate for translating this Latin tense: Atreī fīliī, quī Pelope nātus fuit (Cicero) [217] 'sons of Atreus, who (himself) was born (had been born) from Pelops' In the following examples, the double perfect refers to a situation which existed a long time earlier, before Ovid was exiled:
In Welsh, the pluperfect is formed without an auxiliary verb, usually by interpolating -as-before the simple past ending: parhasem, "we had remained". In Irish, perfect forms are constructed using the idea of being (or having been) after doing something. In the pluperfect, bhíomar tar éis imeacht, "we had gone", literally, "we were after going".
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 is a heavily inflected language with largely free word order. Nouns are inflected for number and case; pronouns and adjectives (including participles) are inflected for number, case, and gender; and verbs are inflected for person, number, tense, aspect, voice, and mood.
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 normal prose practice is to use either a past tense of dēbeō 'I have a duty to' or oportet 'it is proper' with the infinitive, or else a gerundive with a past tense of sum. The jussive pluperfect is also fairly uncommon. The following examples are from Cicero, again using the negative nē: [41] nē popōscissēs (Cicero) [42]
The pluperfect subjunctive, ending in -(i)ssem, represents an event contrary to fact in the past. The same tense is usually used both in the protasis and the apodosis: sī Rōmae fuissem, tē vīdissem cōramque grātiās ēgissem (Cicero) [104] 'if I had been in Rome, I would have seen you and thanked you in person'
In some sentences, the pluperfect subjunctive is a reflection of an original imperfect indicative, as in the following example, where the original verbs would have been mīlitābāmus and habēbāmus: [61] [dīxit eōs] id tantum dēprecārī, nē īnferiōrēs iīs ordinēs quam quōs cum mīlitāssent habuissent adtribuantur (Livy) [62]