It’s Professor Dave, let’s do another round of verb conjugation.
We’ve gone through the first and second conjugations, which include verbs ending in
ARE and ERE, so we may as well wrap things up and go through the third conjugation, which
includes verbs ending in IRE.
When we talk about these verbs, we can’t generalize like we did with the other conjugations.
Instead, the third conjugation verbs are divided into two large groups.
The first group will conjugate similarly to the second conjugation, but the other group
will add a special infix, or a group of letters within the word.
Let’s call these groups pattern A and pattern B, and try one example from each.
Dormire, which means to sleep, will conjugate as follows.
For pattern B, we can conjugate capire, which means to understand.
As you’ll notice, pattern A is not much different from how we would conjugate a verb
in the second conjugation, with the only difference being that the second person plural ends in
ITE rather than ETE.
But pattern B shows something a bit unprecedented.
A group of letters, ISC, is placed between the base of the verb and ending in all forms
except first and second person plural.
This is normal, and it does not make capire an irregular verb, this is just how regular
verbs from this group will be conjugated.
Unfortunately, there is no indication in the infinitive as to which group a verb in the
third conjugation will belong to, so we simply have to memorize them.
Again, these become easy to remember with more repetition, but let’s go through some
common verbs from each group now.
In pattern A we have:
In pattern B we have:
Let’s try some of these in a sentence.
You’ve got the idea, so let’s check comprehension.