Verbal units
When people listen to their native language, we don’t simply hear a stream of sound: we intuitively cluster meaningful units together. When we learn to read, we similarly learn how to recognize clusters of letters and words, to “chunk” the text into meaningful units.
As you learn how to read Latin, we will emphasize this crucial skill. Rather than simply analyzing one word at a time reading left to right, you will learn how to see sentences and whole paragraphs as compositions of smaller pieces, each with a recognizable structure and meaning.
We will use the term verbal unit to refer to the most important underlying structure in Greek. A verb is a word that expresses an action or a state of being. (As Schoolhouse Rock put it decades ago, “Verb: that’s what happening.”) A verbal unit combines some form of a verb with a subject to express a complete idea.
Compared to English, Latin has an rich system of verb forms to create different kinds of verbal units. We will see, forexample, how Latin can use participles to form verbal units quite different from anything in English.
The most important verbal unit in Latin, however, is the finite verb. Every sentence has at least one verbal unit expressed with a finite verb plus a subject, even if these are only implied. Subjects and verbs can be implied in English, too: if someone asks you “Coffee or tea?” they are implying “Would you like coffee or tea?” a sentence with a subject (“you”) and verb (“would like”).
We have borrowed our own word “verb” from Latin grammarians. They referred to verbs with the term verbum, an everyday word that could mean a “sentence,” “expression,” or evern “conversation.” verbum is a complete idea. Even if you leave out every other word of a sentence, the finite verb constitutes a complete statement.