The Lost Slave Encounter: Imperfect vs. Perfect Tenses

1. In this little story, two slaves are returning home when they are confronted by a dog wandering loose in the streets. As with many wild street mongrols, this pooch doesn’t much like people, and so our two slaves find themselves in quite a pickle! You will also see the use of two different forms of past tense verbs. When the story’s action is about to change course, when something suddenly interrupts what the characters were doing, or to show that something that used to happen in the past stopped happening, we use what is called the IMPERFECT tense form of the verb. When the story needs to explain just a one time event, just a basic old “past tense” (-ed on the end of the word for example), we use what is called the PERFECT tense verb form.

2. Imperfect tense Perfect tense The slaves were walking through the street. Suddenly a dog barked. Here we see the slaves doing something (walking) that will soon be interupted by another event. To show the reader or listener that this change of action will soon occur, English uses the helping verb “were” and adds an “-ing” to the end of the verb “walk”. Now we have the action (dog barking) that interrupted the other action (slaves walking). To show that this action is just a one time event and that it is not going to be interrupted (like the “slaves walking” was), English just uses the regular past tense form of the verb (barked) with no helping verb.

3. Imperfect tense Perfect tense In Latin, instead of using a helping verb (such as “was” or “were” in English) the IMPERFECT tense uses a different ending. Imperfect tense verbs use the “–ba-” syllable, placed right before the plural ending “-nt ” to show the imperfect tense is being used. In Latin, the we see that the PERFECT tense form of the verb does NOT have that “–ba-” syllable right before the singular ending “-t”. Remember – the perfect tense usually has a slightly different spelling than the present tense form, just as it does in English!

4. Grumio was afraid of the dog. “Pest!” shouted the cook. Here the slave is showing fear, but at some point in the story something will stop Grumio from being afraid. The use of the Imperfect tense (“was afraid” or “timebat”) for the verb shows that this feeling of fear will at some point stop because of some other action. Grumio, in panic and fear, yells at the bothersome mutt. His action (shouted) just happened once. The shout was not interrupted by another action and it did not repeat itself over a period of time, thus the use of the Perfect tense (“shouted” or “clamavit”) verb form .

5. Clemens was brave. But the dog overpowered Clemens Clemens WAS brave, but that bravery came to an end when the dog overpowered him. The use of the two different types of past tenses (Imperfect and Perfect) let’s us convey much more meaning and detail when describing event that happened in the past. We can get across which actions were continually done in the past, or happened in the past but were interrupted by something else (Imperfect tense) We can show which actions caused those interruptions or which were just simple, one time only actions in the past (Perfect tense)

7. Which verb from these two sentences is in the imperfect tense? Which verb from these two sentences is in the imperfect tense?

8. Try to translate this part of the story into good English. Make sure you think about the tense of the verbs in each sentence and how you should translate those tenses into English.

9. Try to translate this part of the story into good English. Make sure you think about the tense of the verbs in each sentence and how you should translate those tenses into English.