sciebamus

Sciebamus is the first person plural imperfect active indicative form of the Latin verb scire, meaning "we knew" or "we used to know." It is part of the irregular verb scire, which means "to know" and does not follow a standard conjugation pattern like regular -ire verbs. The form sciebamus specifically expresses a past, ongoing, or repeated state of knowledge.

In Latin, the imperfect tense describes actions or states in the past that were continuous, habitual, or not completed at a past time. Therefore, sciebamus typically signals that the speaker and others possessed knowledge at an earlier time, rather than a single completed act of knowing. It often appears in narratives or descriptive passages to set background information or to report what was known at that time.

Morphology and related forms: the imperfect of scire for other persons are sciebam (1st person singular), sciebas (2nd person singular), sciebat (3rd person singular), sciebatis (2nd person plural), and sciebant (3rd person plural). The present system of scire includes forms such as scio, scis, scit, scimus, scitis, sciunt. Because scire is irregular, its imperfect forms do not follow a single regular stem pattern used by many other -ire verbs, though they share the imperfect ending that marks the tense.

Usage and significance: sciebamus appears primarily in Classical Latin texts, where it conveys past knowledge in prose, history, or rhetoric. It is a standard example of Latin past imperfect aspect and is often encountered in quotations, translations, and language studies focused on verb forms.

See also: scio, scire, Latin verb conjugation, imperfect tense.