One Word for Three Moods — the Latin verb, and fiat
The ending carries the verb too
Lesson two showed that a Latin noun's ending does the work English does with word order. The verb is the same idea again, and further: one Latin verb ending carries person, number, tense, mood and voice at once. Amo is "I love" — no pronoun needed, because the -o is the I. Amat, he loves. Amavit, he loved and it is done. Amabit, he will love. Four English phrases, four Latin words, and the difference is all at the end.
The perfect: done, and reported
The Vulgate's narrative runs mostly on the perfect, the tense for something finished. Genesis 1:27 uses one verb three times: Et creavit Deus hominem ad imaginem suam: ad imaginem Dei creavit illum, masculum et feminam creavit eos. Creavit — he created — three times over, done and done and done. Jerome is rendering Hebrew that alternates between two conjugations there, as the Hebrew course's third lesson shows; Latin has no such alternation and uses the one perfect for all three.
The subjunctive, and the word this course keeps returning to
Beside the indicative — which reports — Latin has the subjunctive, which does not: it wishes, it commands at a distance, it holds a thing open. And its most famous instance is a word you met in lesson one. Fiat. Let it be, let it become. Three consonants of grammar carrying most of the Latin Bible's weight.
One Latin word, three different originals
Here is the thing worth the lesson, and you can check every step of it on this site. Genesis 1:3: Dixitque Deus: Fiat lux — and behind that fiat is Hebrew יְהִי, ye.Hi, a qal jussive, the Hebrew form for a third-person command. Matthew 6:10: fiat voluntas tua — and behind that fiat is Greek γενηθήτω, genēthētō, an aorist imperative in the third person. Luke 1:38: fiat mihi secundum verbum tuum — and behind that fiat is γένοιτό, genoito, an aorist optative, the rarest mood in the New Testament, and a wish rather than a command. A Hebrew jussive, a Greek imperative and a Greek optative, and Latin answers all three with the same four letters. Whatever else translation is, it is this: three distinctions arriving in a language that has one word for them.
Deponents, which lie about their voice
Latin has the same oddity Greek does. Some verbs wear passive endings and mean something active — grammarians call them deponent, from deponere, to lay aside, because they have laid their active forms down. John 11:35, the shortest verse, is one: Et lacrimatus est Jesus. Lacrimatus est looks like "he was wept"; it means Jesus wept. If you meet a Latin verb that seems to be passive and makes no sense that way, this is usually why.
Passives made of two words
The real Latin passives in the perfect are built the way English builds them, from a participle and the verb to be. John 1:14: Verbum caro factum est — the Word was made flesh, factum (made) plus est (is). Mark 1:15: impletum est tempus, the time has been fulfilled. Ephesians 2:8: gratia enim estis salvati, by grace you have been saved. In each case the Greek behind it is a single word carrying the same sense — and in Mark and Ephesians it is the Greek perfect, the tense that means done and still standing, which the Latin two-word form catches rather well.
Why it matters on this site
The Clementine Vulgate is on the Lantern's shelves in full, and the Hebrew and Greek behind it are a tap away in the reader. That is an unusual thing to have in one place: you can hold the Latin against its source without leaving the page, and see for yourself where a translator had a choice and what he did with it. The Lantern Direct is making the same kind of choice, book by book, in English.
The words themselves
← Endings Do the Work — and three words the Direct argues with