Latin Future, Pluperfect and Future Perfect

The perfect tense article made a promise: learn the third principal part and you get three tenses out of it. Here are the other two, plus the future, which is a present-stem tense and the last of the six indicative actives you need.

After that there is nothing more to learn about the indicative active, which is a genuinely cheering thought at this stage.

The future comes in two shapes

Latin cannot leave well alone. First and second conjugation verbs form the future one way, third and fourth form it another, and there is no deep reason for it beyond history.

First and second conjugation insert -bi-:

Third and fourth conjugation change the vowel instead:

The -io verbs of the third conjugation - capio, facio, fugio, accipio - go with the fourth: capiam, capies, capiet.

The two traps, and they are the same trap

Look at what one letter does.

amabit he will love / amabat he was loving

dicet he will say / dicit he says

-bi- is future and -ba- is imperfect. -e- is future and -i- is present. Both distinctions live entirely in a vowel in the middle of the word, which is the last place an English reader looks. Almost everyone who has read Latin has at some point mistranslated a prophecy as a habit.

Drill the pairs, not the paradigms. Knowing that the future of dico is dicam, dices, dicet is not the same skill as spotting dicet in a line of prose and not reading it as dicit.

The irregulars are small

Eo is the one to notice: its present looks like a fourth conjugation verb, and yet it takes the -bo future of the first. Everything built on sum inherits ero, so adero I will be present, aberit he will be absent.

The perfect stem hands over two more tenses

You already have the stem. Take the third principal part, drop the -i, and both remaining tenses fall out.

Pluperfect: stem plus -eram, -eras, -erat, -eramus, -eratis, -erant. That is the imperfect of sum, which makes it trivial to remember.

dixeram, dixeras, dixerat, dixeramus, dixeratis, dixerant

I had said, you had said, he had said...

Future perfect: stem plus -ero, -eris, -erit, -erimus, -eritis, -erint. That is the future of sum with one deviation, and the deviation matters: the third plural is -erint, not -erunt, because -erunt is already taken by the perfect.

dixero, dixeris, dixerit, dixerimus, dixeritis, dixerint

I will have said, you will have said...

All six tenses on one verb

Three tenses on the present stem, three on the perfect stem, and the split is exactly where the third principal part takes over. If you can produce that table for dico, sum, facio, venio and habeo, you can read most Latin narrative prose.

Where Latin is fussy and English is not

Here is the part that actually changes how you read.

English is careless about time inside subordinate clauses. We say when you arrive, I will tell you, putting arrive in the present tense even though the arriving has not happened and will finish before the telling begins. Everyone understands, so nobody minds.

Latin minds. It puts the subordinate verb in the tense the logic demands:

Cum veneris, dicam.

Literally: when you will have arrived, I will say. Naturally: when you arrive, I will tell you.

Si hoc feceris, laetus eris.

Literally: if you will have done this, you will be happy.

Ubi ad portum venerimus, litteras scribemus.

When we reach the harbour, we will write the letter.

The rule is simple enough to apply on sight: after cum, si, nisi, ubi, simul ac, postquam and donec, if the action finishes before the main verb's action starts, Latin uses the future perfect and English uses a present. A future perfect in a subordinate clause is therefore almost always translated by an English present, and if you translate it literally you will produce something no English speaker would say.

And the asymmetry runs the other way too

The same fussiness produces the opposite effect in past narrative. After postquam, ubi and simul ac, Latin normally uses the perfect where English reaches for a pluperfect:

Postquam urbem vicit, domum rediit.

After he had captured the city, he returned home.

Latin says vicit, he captured. English says had captured. Neither is wrong; they are different habits about which clause carries the time-marking. The lesson for a translator is not to hunt for a Latin pluperfect every time an English had appears, and not to render every Latin perfect as a plain past.

The genuine Latin pluperfect earns its keep elsewhere, when the earlier event is being held up against a later past one:

Milites qui in urbem venerant iam abierant.

The soldiers who had come into the city had already left.

Two past events, one clearly before the other, and both marked.

What to take away

• Future: -bo, -bis, -bit for the first two conjugations, -am, -es, -et for the last two.
• Dicet is not dicit and amabit is not amabat. The vowel is the tense.
• Pluperfect is the perfect stem plus the imperfect of sum: dixeram.
• Future perfect is the perfect stem plus the future of sum, except -erint in the third plural: dixero, dixerint.
• After cum, si and ubi, expect a future perfect where English uses a present. After postquam, expect a perfect where English uses a pluperfect.