There are five essential grammatical terms that are used in reference to verbs. They are

The mood of the verb indicates how the speaker feels about the action. Does the speaker feel that what’s being said is a fact, a command, or is there something uncertain about it in the speaker’s mind? Mood can also show that the verb is inside complicated grammar.

Tense is the grammatical term used to indicate when the action of the verb is happening.

Voice is the term used to indicate whether the subject of the verb is acting or being acted upon.

Person is the grammatical term which indicates the nature of the subject. Is it I, you, he/she/it, we, you plural, or where I grew up, y’all, or they?

And finally, number says whether the subject is singular or plural, that is, one person or many.

For the moment, all the verbs that we will deal with are indicative in mood (that is, they indicate a fact), present in tense (they happen now), and active in voice (the subject is the doer of the verb). In Chapter 1, we’ll focus mainly on how to change person... That is, who is doing the action, and number, begs us to ask the question of whether the person is singular or plural?

Another important grammatical term concerning Latin verbs is conjugation. Conjugation has two meanings in Latin.

However, like many verbs that are very commonly used, the verb “to be” in Latin is irregular.

Its forms are:

Instead, with the verb “to be” two things are equated. For instance, when you say, “The man is a teacher,” you’re essentially saying “Man equals teacher.” So in place of an accusative direct object the Latin sum expects a nominative predicate. In this case the predicate is nominative because it is being equated with the subject which is nominative. So to go back to our example, “The man is a teacher,” “man” is the subject and “teacher” is the predicate. In Latin this sentence would be vir est magister, where vir is the nominative subject and magister is the nominative predicate. Predicates can be adjectives as well as nouns but in either instance the predicate is nominative.

So one can say, puer est parvus “the boy is small,” or otium est malum, “leisure is evil,” or estis boni “y’all are good,” or if you translate the predicate as a substantive, what we studied before, an adjective functioning as a noun, you could translate it as, “y’all are good men,” or “good people” since masculine gender functions as common gender in Latin. Please note that predicate adjectives agree with the subject in number and gender as well as case whereas predicate nouns agree with the subject only in case because nouns have to maintain their own number and gender. Conversely, adjectives must agree with the noun they go with in number, gender and case.