Participles like fully-cooked chicken

Participles, as the earlier blog suggested, can be tough cookies.  But a little milk takes care of some of that, so let's go after them like a two-year-old goes after an Oreo.  And who knows?  Maybe we'll even find something tasty in them yet.
Participles belong to that vast, unwashed category of words called verbals.  Sometimes we want to call them something else entirely, but let vocabulary be what may and try to understand it.  Though actually nouns or adjectives,  this ill-mannered gang carry with them certain roles we generally think of as verbs.  First, they usually do/did something (like loving, hitting, jumped, or killed).  We commonly think this makes them verbs, but for the time being you must trust me they are wholly incapable of doing a verb's job as is.    Second, participles show some characteristic of the action.  It either is ongoing--we call that progressive--or it is finished--that's called perfect.  Think of the words I used:  ongoing and finished.  You can see how we express that aspect.  Third, they tell us when this activity happened.  Well, sort of.  Like we tell our parents when we arrived home from the "study session" at our friends house.  Context is everything, right?  And finally, they indicate how that action is viewed--it either goes out (active--loving) or comes back (passive--loved).  Remember our illustration from class:  the killing chicken vs the killed chicken.  Be sure to cook it all the way!
Yes, a dense paragraph, but hopefully it makes some things clear:  participles show an event with some aspect of completion or progression occurring at some relative time while its voice declares whether it did the action or had it done back.
Whew.  That was a lot to bite off at one time.  And what started off like a cookie tastes more like chicken now.  I hope its fully cooked.

A place to start

The place to start with verbs:  what are they, actually?  Without going into too much detail, a verb  shows an event in time.  This event may be an obvious action (like my favorite example verb, kill) or something not-obvious (like the hiding verbs of be or have).  Either way, verbs say that something happened (event) at some time (tense), and they relate it to someone/something (the subject).  To go too much farther right now is to risk muddying the water with nuances and caveats.  Let’s just agree with what I have written and move on.

Verbs also have some standard forms we need to know.  An infinitive (to kill, to be, to have) is the basic form, often used in dictionaries, and states the basic activity.  It has no subject.  A finite verb (I kill, you were, he will have...) is any form of the verb + subject.  A subject is a must, and the verb can be in any tense.  An imperative (kill!, be!, have!) uses the basic activity as a command.  Technically it has no subject (though you is implied).  Participles and gerunds, while related to verbs, are beyond our scope right now.  Forget I said anything about them.

So far this has been in English about English.  I’ll connect it to Latin starting in the next couple of posts.

Some Ground Rules

What is in a verb?  Well, more than you might think.  And when learning how to use verbs, knowing their inner parts should be very helpful.  So some ground rules for our upcoming posts on verbs:

1.  We get no brownie points for knowing the ins and outs of verbs if we can’t then actually use them.

2.  We only get some brownie points for knowing how to use verbs but not knowing how they work.

3.  What verbs do in Latin, they also do in English (and French, and Spanish, and...), so a grasp of what verbs do is helpful beyond just one language--but you have to make the connection.

The first couple of posts will be background.  Then I will launch into the current verb tenses/moods we are using in class.  If you think you need a refresher, stay tuned; if your English grammar is solid, wait till the current class topics come up.  

Either way it should be a good time.