Home » History » Italian Genealogy » Translating Latin Documents Part II: Verbs

Translating Latin Documents Part II: Verbs

© Eva Holmes

There's no question about it. Latin verbs are complicated. This article will give you enough information to be able to find Latin verbs in the dictionary (hopefully). If you prefer hard-copy dictionaries to the many electronic versions available, I recommend the Cassell's, which should be under ten dollars.

Because most of the words we're concerned with are in the third person singular or plural, I'll just give a brief explanation of how Latin verbs work. Depending on the subject of the sentence, a person would conjugate the verb (i.e. put a different ending onto the stem) to match the subject. We don't conjugate many verbs in English, but you can probably think of some. The verb 'to be' is an example: I am, you are, he/she/it is.

A Latin verb, like a noun, has two parts-- the stem and the ending. What makes the Latin verb tricky is that there are several different stems! This can make life miserable when you are searching in a dictionary. Words are located in the dictionary by their present-tense stem and the present infinitive.

However, many of the words you'll see will be in the perfect tense, which is the past-tense used to describe actions which happened once at a certain time, like birth. The perfect stem can be different from the present stem. In most cases the stems are similar enough so that you can easily find your word, but that is not always the case.

It can also be hard to figure out which is the stem and which is the ending of the word if you don't have the endings memorized. Endings range from one to five letters long and stems can be as short as two letters. Stems will usually end in consonants and endings almost always begin with a vowel, so that might help some. Also, in the front or middle of most dictionaries there are lists of endings, so you can always look at those if you're having a hard time finding a word. There isn't a quick fix for any of this. Fortunately, Latin verbs are relatively easy to pick out of genealogical documents. They'll be the words that end in 't' :) Not all Latin verbs end in the letter 't', of course, but I'd guess that most of the verbs used in vital documents are in the third person (modifying words like he, she, or they). Two past-tense endings which you will see often are 'it' which is used for the third person singular and 'erunt' which is plural.