Part IV forms the perfect and pluperfect in the active voice, and the (exceedingly rare) future perfect, active.Part III forms the aorist in the active and middle voices.Part II forms the future tense in the active and middle voices.Part I forms the entire present system, as well as the imperfect.Verbs in Ancient Greek have six principal parts: present (I), future (II), aorist (III), perfect (IV), perfect middle (V) and aorist passive (VI), each listed in its first-person singular form: A handful of verbs are also defective, including the verb ōdī – ōdisse, 'to hate', which only has perfect forms derived from a single stem. A handful of verbs, such as sum - esse - fuī - futūrum ('to be'), are simply irregular.Ī number of verbs have fewer than four principal parts: deponent verbs, such as hortŏr – hortāri – hortātus sum, 'to exhort', lack a perfect form, as do semi-deponent verbs, such as audeō – audēre – ausus sum, 'to dare' in both cases, passive forms are treated as active, so all perfect forms are covered by the perfect participle. Others have more complicated forms: regō ('I rule') has the perfect form rēxī and perfect participle rēctum, derived as * reg-sī and * reg-tum. The auxiliary verb is often dropped when writing poetry in Latin.įor many Latin verbs, the principal parts are predictable: portō shown above uses a single stem, port-, and all principal parts are derived from them with the endings -ō – -āre – -āvī – -ātum. However, all active perfect forms are derived from the third principal part (so portāveram, 'I had carried', is taken from portāv-) while the perfect participle ( portātus, portāta, portātum, 'having been carried') is derived from the supine and is used to form the perfect passive participle with the auxiliary verb sum (such as portātum est, 'it has been carried'). Most of the verb forms in Latin derive from the first two principal parts: portābō, 'I shall carry', is derived from the root portā-, taken from the present infinitive. For example, the verb for 'to carry' is given as portō – portāre – portāvī – portātum, where portō is the first-person singular present active indicative ('I carry'), portāre is the present active infinitive ('to carry'), portāvī is the first-person singular perfect active indicative ('I carried'), and portātum is the neuter supine. In Latin, most verbs have four principal parts. See also: Latin conjugation § Conjugations It does not cover random irregularities.Ĭlassical languages Latin It is normally restricted to regular verbs, nouns, etc., and applies to languages where the regular paradigm is based on more than one underlying form. irregularity always occurs at the same place in an otherwise regular system.Īlthough the term 'principal part' is usually applied to verbs, the same phenomenon can be found in some languages in nouns and other word types.

But the concept can be carried over to many languages in which the verbs have some kind of 'regular irregularity', i.e.

In French, for example, regular verbs can be deduced from a single form, the infinitive, and irregular verbs are too random to be systematized under fixed parts. Not all languages have to be taught in this way. The concept originates in the humanist Latin schools, where students learned verbs by chanting them in the four key forms from which all other forms can be deduced, for example: In language learning, the principal parts of a verb are those forms that a student must memorize in order to be able to conjugate the verb through all its forms.

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Preterite endings ir