First Form Help!

[redapples123]

Please help us---We are using First Form. Could someone please explain exactly what a "form" in Latin is? I thought it was a verb and all of the ways it could be conjugated. I thought that "ways" or "forms" meant the same thing. Then someone just told me NO --conjugations are just "ways" not FORMS. They said the forms are only the 4 principal parts EXAMPLE--amo, amare, etc. Now we are really confused. Thank You!

[tanya]

You are right. The forms are the conjugations of verbs and the declensions of nouns. I suppose you could also call the principal parts forms. They would be the forms that help you to produce the other forms of the verbs. So, you would use the 2nd principal part of amo (amare) to form the present tense of amo: amo, amas, amat ... each of which would be a form. Amas is a form, amamus is a form, amant is a form -- they, along with all the others, are the various forms of the verb amo. The verb in English has forms also -- love, loves, loving, loved -- just not as many. A conjugation is simply the complete set of all the forms of a particular verb. "Conjugate" is from con-jugare, "to yoke all together". In the specific sense, it is the complete set of all the forms of a particular verb -- ie, the conjugation of amo. In the more general sense, it is the set of all the individual conjugations of verbs of a particular type -- ie, the first conjugation.

Tanya Charlton