User:Daniel Couto Vale/sandbox/Latin verb classes

In linguistics, inflecting a verb (a.k.a. conjugating a verb) is the act of composing a verb with verb parts. Usually, an inflection is selected according to grammatical features from different systems (e.g. mood, tense, voice, person, gender, number) and lexical features (e.g. transitive, intransitive, intransitive deponent).

Inflections
Verbs can be organised in two dimensions: a lexical and a grammatical. Lexically, a verb is a vocabulary item in a large open list. The item putō (I think) opposes the items videō, (I see) and audiō (I hear) because they represent different mental processes, one of cognition and the other two of perception. Grammatically, a verb is an inflection which is realised by selecting and ordering verb parts and which carries a bundle of grammatical features. For instance, the verb putō (I think) opposes the verbs putās (you think) and putat (he/she thinks) in person, which is one of the dimensions in which inflections oppose one another.

In the table below, there are 42 verbs organized as 6 lexical items and 7 inflections.

Inflectional classes
The same inflection is realised in different ways for different lexical items: for instance, when realising a 3rd-person plural inflection for different vocabulary items, the nt ending in putant (they think) is selected for putō putāre (think) and the unt ending in dīcunt (they say) is selected for dīcō dīcere (say). This means that different lexical items belong to different inflectional classes, that is, different classes when it comes to inflecting a verb.

Īnfectum classes
In Early Latin (e.g. Plautus) and to some extent in Early Classical Latin (e.g. Varro and Lucretius), there used to be six classes of verbal items, roughly corresponding to the six aspectual vowels of the īnfectum inflections: (1) putō, putāre, (2) videō, vidēre, (3) audiō, audīre, (4) capiō, capere, (5) statuō, statuere, (5) relinquō, relinquere, (6) dīcō, dīcere (ā, ē, ī, i, u/v, ø). Here ø stands for no aspectual vowel at the end of the īnfectum stem. However, for most of the Classical Period, vocabulary items belonged to one of five classes for īnfectum inflections: (1) putō, putāre, (2) videō, vidēre, (3) audiō, audīre, (4) capiō, capere, (5) statuō, statuere, (5) relinquō, relinquere, (5) dīcō, dīcere (ā, ē, ī, i, u/v/ø), whereby verbs with stems ending in u/v/ø were inflected in the same way. Despite this fact, the number of "conjugations" has been historically said to be 3, then 4, which means either two, three or four inflectional classes of īnfectum verbs used to be subsumed under the same conjugation name (see number of Latin conjugations).


 * 1) ā conjugation
 * 2) ē conjugation
 * 3) ī conjugation.
 * 4) i conjugation
 * 5) u/v/ø conjugation

One method to determine the inflectional class of a verb in Classical Latin is to identify the aspectual vowel of verbs in two inflections: the 'indicative present active first person' and the 'infinitive active'. These two inflections are presented in modern dictionaries as principal parts.

In Early Latin, the u/v conjunction differed from the ø conjunction in a single inflection: namely the 'indicative present active third person plural'. Below you can see how the inflection evolved, merging two inflectional classes into one.

Perfectum classes
In Classical Latin, verbal items belong to one of three classes for perfectum inflections: (1) putāvī, (2) dīxī, (3) cēpī.


 * 1) v-strand perfectum stem (with v syncopy)
 * 2) s-strand perfectum stem (with s syncopy)
 * 3) u/ø-strand perfectum stem (without syncopy)

One can easily determine the perfectum class for the vocabulary item by attending to the penultimate sound in the 'indicative perfect 1st person singular' inflection. When determining the perfectum class, one must consider that 'x' was not a letter, but a ligature corresponding to 'c' + 's'.

Supine classes
Finally, each lexical item belongs to one of three classes for supine inflections: (1) mortuus, moritūrus, (2) ortus, oritūrus, (3) putātus, putātūrus:


 * 1) u removal and i insertion
 * 2) no removal and i insertion
 * 3) no change