Talk:Latin tenses

Missing B-Class criteria?
Hello peer reviewers of the Project Latin and the Project Assessment. I have time in the next months to work on this article and I would like to make it become a B-class article. I would appreciate your reviews. Plese substitute a "Reviewer #" column head with your name and please answer in the cells if the article fulfills each of the six criteria for a B-Class article. If not, please tell below what should be done to fulfill the missing criteria. I will go through each suggestion.

@Kanjuzi, I will ask you if the suggestions should be applied before applying them. I will only perform changes that I agree with you because I know you put a lot of effort here.

Criterion 1 – Needed improvements

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Criterion 2 – Needed improvements

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Criterion 3 – Needed improvements

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Criterion 4 – Needed improvements

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Criterion 5 – Needed improvements

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Criterion 6 – Needed improvements

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Replacement of the lead
I have replaced and rewritten the lead for reasons (mentioned above): 1. It's too long, and doesn't summarise the whole subject succinctly. 2. The verb ago doesn't mean "act". 3. The "tense" agere coepero is not considered to be a tense by any standard grammar, nor is it one. 4. The terms "secondary present" and "secondary past" are not standard terms found in any Latin grammar book, but apparently invented by the previous writer. No citation is given for these terms. If such terms exist it should be made clear which author invented them (since they are completely non-traditional as far as Latin is concerned), and this should go further down the article, not in the lead. 5. There is no such thing as a "supinum" aspect. Tenses such as acturus sum are presumably infectum, and have a corresponding perfectum tense acturus fui, which have been omitted from the table. But to go into details of these rarely used tenses does not seem appropriate in the lead, which should just summarise the main facts. 6. The fact that subjunctives, infinitives, imperatives, and participles also have different tenses needs to be mentioned in the lead, even if no details are given, since these are very important in Latin grammar. Kanjuzi (talk) 10:15, 12 November 2022 (UTC)

Headings and subheadings
When an article is read on a laptop, the topics can be nested, but this doesn't seem to work on a smartphone. Consequently, if topics are nested, then when using a smartphone you seem to get very long sections which you have to scroll down for ages. To prevent this I have upgraded some headings from ===x=== to ==x== so that on a phone there will be more headings and less scrolling between headings. But it still doesn't seem very satisfactory. If anyone can suggest a solution to this, I would be interested to hear. Kanjuzi (talk) 20:15, 23 March 2023 (UTC)


 * Hi @Kanjuzi, since this article is about tense morphology and syntax, I think you could organize the content in two levels. At the first level, I would create an introduction section telling that there are 5 traditional 'modes' for Latin verbs, I would write five sections on morphology, one for each 'mode' (namely Indicative, Subjunctive, Infinitive, Participle, Imperative), and I would write a final section on possible tense combinations (syntax).
 * The Latin tense system
 * Indicative (Present indicative, Future indicative, Imperfect indicative, Perfect indicative, Future perfect indicative, Pluperfect indicative, Perfect passive tenses made with fuī and fueram, Perfect tenses made with habeō, Periphrastic future tenses, Tenses with the gerundive)
 * Subjunctive (Present subjunctive, Imperfect subjunctive, Perfect subjunctive, Pluperfect subjunctive, Subjunctive tenses formed with the future participle, Forem, Ductus forem, Archaic forms of the subjunctive)
 * Infinitive (Infinitive tenses)
 * Participle (Present participle, Perfect participle, Future participle)
 * Imperative (The imperative mood)
 * Tense combinations (Sequence of tenses rule)
 * Bibliography
 * References
 * Citations
 * At the second level, I would put the current sections you have, one level lower. Since the tenses 'future', 'present' and 'past'/'imperfect' occur in every mode, this content structure would create a navigation structure that allows people to jump across the modes. Daniel Couto Vale (talk) 18:13, 21 July 2024 (UTC)

Perfect subjunctive in ideal conditional
Why do the translations use present conditional forms? They imply a general meaning, while I would assume that the meaning of perfect subjunctive in ideal conditional is comparable to the meaning of pluperfect subjunctive in counterfactual conditional and these actions would have been completed in the hypothetical situation. 109.42.179.83 (talk) 11:35, 23 January 2024 (UTC)


 * In English, there are two counterfactual conditional forms for each tense: the form of the conditioning event and the form of the conditioned event.
 * Conditional nexus between future counterfactual events
 * 'It will be very hot. If I earned more money, I would buy an air conditioner next month.'
 * Conditional nexus between present counterfactual events
 * 'It is very hot. If I earned more money, I would be buying an air conditioner now.'
 * Conditional nexus between past counterfactual events
 * 'It was very hot. If I had earned more money, I would have bought an airconditioner last month.'
 * In Latin, the 'perfect subjunctive' verb represents a present or future conditioned event (imperfect meaning) and the 'pluperfect subjunctive' verb represents a past conditioned event (perfect meaning).
 * sī nunc mē suspendam, meīs inimīcīs voluptātem creāverim (Plautus)
 * 'If I were hanging myself now, I would be pleasing my enemies.'
 * However, the same cannot be said of concessional nexuses between counterfactual events. In this case, both conceded and conceding future and present events are represented by 'perfect subjunctive'.
 * Cicerōnī nēmo ducentōs nunc dederit nummōs, nisi fulserit ānulus ingēns (Juvenal)
 * 'nowadays no one would give Cicero two hundred denaries, unless a huge ring glittered (on his finger)'
 * As I understand your question, the expression 'would give' above has a connotation of generalised subject, whereas the expression 'would be pleasing' does not. Indeed, in English this difference between conditional forms exists and in Latin it does not. Translators tend to translate words such as creāverim systematically by 'would please' because Latin translators learn to translate form-by-form, not meaning-by-meaning. Nonetheless, it is a wrong assumption that a 'perfect subjunctive' verb such as dederit represents a past conceded event as in 'would have given' or that one such as fulserit represents a past conceding event as in 'had glittered'.
 * I hope I have helped. Daniel Couto Vale (talk) 19:44, 21 July 2024 (UTC)