Ch 5 · Lesson 8Latin · Chapter 5 · Lesson 8 · Grammar primer
The perfect: dixi, feci, fui
Latin's past tense has its own stem and its own endings, and no amount of staring at the present will predict from . This is why dictionaries list four principal parts.
The short version
Six perfect endings, no exceptions anywhere
, ,
Why?Hide
Take the third principal part, strip the -i, and you have the perfect stem. Onto it go -i, -isti, -it, -imus, -istis, -erunt, and those six never vary for any verb in the language, regular or irregular. , , gives , , , , , . All the work is in knowing the stem, which is why verbs are cited four times. The endings themselves are free.
Perfect is what happened, imperfect is what was going on
,
Why?Hide
The contrast is the whole point of having both. is he said, one completed event. is he was saying, or he used to say, an action still running in the background. Latin narrative uses the perfect for the chain of events and the imperfect in -bam for the scenery behind them. Translate every past verb as a flat English past and you throw away a distinction the writer was making deliberately.
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