Hi guys
I know the title seems really weird, considering I’m a native English speaker.
But seriously. When you learn a language from birth, you don’t really think too hard about the grammar.
But when you learn Latin, you need grammar. And it’s actually decently easy.
If you see a “ba” before the ending? It’s imperfect, was/were. If you see “i, isti, it, imus, istis, erunt”, it’s perfect tense, and it’s “has verbed”, “did verb” or “verbed”.
BUT ENGLISH.
For context surrounding this blog: our school did exam review. And we went over English grammar.
Which made me realize: you actually learn very little grammar in English class. It’s more literature than anything.
I LEARNED MORE ENGLISH GRAMMAR IN LATIN THAN IN ENGLISH.
This does kind of make sense, because to understand how Latin works, you need grammar in English for translation. Hence the title.
They help each other. Sometimes.
But WHY IS ENGLISH GRAMMAR SO HARD?
Latin can make it easier. What do I mean?
Well, Latin has six tenses: pluperfect, perfect, imperfect, present, future, future perfect. All have their own easily distinguishable patterns and translations:
Let’s use “to cry” as an example.
Pluperfect: HAD cried
Perfect: DID cry, CRIED, or HAS cried
Imperfect: WAS crying or WERE crying
Present: IS crying, CRIES, CRY, AM crying, ARE crying
Future: WILL cry
Future perfect: WILL HAVE cried
Easy, right? They’re all easy to form, too.
Now what about English tenses? Well it gets kind of confusing.
English has three. Simple, Progressive, and Perfect. All tenses have present, past and future tenses, listed in that order below.
Simple (verbs that just occur): cries, cried, will cry
Progressive (ongoing actions in time): is crying, was crying, will be crying
Perfect (actions completed in the timeline): has cried, had cried, will have cried
How does this make this easier or harder?
Well, progressive includes gerunds, verbal nouns ending in -ing. “I am running” means you’re running now. So that helps understand why those are ongoing.
Perfect system is almost the same: has = perfect and had = pluperfect, but imperfect is missing.
Imperfect is now progressive. With future and present.
Present is now in two different places, and even going just off present tense, there’s a Latin perfect in there.
Which confuses me.
Also, modifiers have to be right next to what they modify in English to maintain meaning of a sentence. In Latin, they don’t, but they do match the case number and gender of what they modify. See? Easy!
Like, if I said “The girl has a horse,” If I wanted to call one of them beautiful, I’d say “pulchra” to modify girl as “puella” to match it in the nominative singular feminine, and “pulchrum” for the horse as “equum” is accusative singular masculine. These adjectives will usually be next to eachother. but they don’t have to be and you’ll easily find them!
Moods in both are the same. My Latin teacher said it best, though:
Indicative is for fact (“They ran yesterday.”), Imperative is for commands(“Run to the store and get milk!”), Subjunctive is for possibility (“I would run if it wasn’t raining.”).
My English teacher gave a quick, confusing explanation, so I used the Latin here.
So yeah, grammar can be confusing. It’s easier in Latin because patterns and such, for me. English has goofy fricking verbs with weird conjugation.
Latin isn’t super easy (there are exceptions), but it is easy.
With that, I wish you luck in Latin or English :DD
Bye bye :33