Romance verbs


Romance verbs are the most inflected part of speech in the language family. In the transition from Latin to the Romance languages, verbs went through many phonological, syntactic, and semantic changes. Most of the distinctions present in classical Latin continued to be made, but synthetic forms were often replaced with more analytic ones. Other verb forms changed meaning, and new forms also appeared.

Overview

The following table presents a comparison of the conjugation of the regular verb cantare "to sing" in Classical Latin, and Vulgar Latin, and diverse languages derived from Latin. The conjugations below were given from their respective Wiktionary pages.
Note that the Vulgar Latin reconstructions are believed to have regularized word stress within each tense. Word-final probably converged on. Many verb forms have undergone elisions, like the indicative pluperfect cantāveram > *cantára and the subjunctive imperfect cantāvissem > *cantásse.

Vulgar Latin

In this section, "Vulgar Latin" is actually reconstructed as reconstructed Proto-Italo-Western Romance, most notably the shift from Classical Latin -i- and -u- to -e- /e/ and -o- /o/, as opposed to inherited /ɛ/ and /ɔ/ respectively. The developments include:
  • The -v- of the perfect tenses were dropped or elided, but sometimes become /u/ after vowels.
  • The past participle were sometimes sporadically rounded to *-ū-, this situation is preserved in French.
  • The "unstressed" indicative imperfect is very likely from shortened *-bămus, *-bătis, yielding to the stress on the third-from-last syllable, as opposed to Classical Latin stress on the second-from-last syllable. Languages which retain this irregular stress were the languages of Iberia, Sicilian, and French.
  • Romance metaphony. In forms containing -ī next to mid-open vowels, especially in preterite forms were heightened.
In the Proto-Romance grammatical tradition, the second and third conjugation are known as third conjugation, similarly to French.

First conjugation

Verbs in the first conjugation are in -āre, later evolved to -are in Italian, -ar in most Romance languages and -er in French.

Second conjugation

Verbs in the second conjugation are in -ēre, later evolved to -ere in Italian, -er in most Romance languages and -oir in French. Another infinitive -ere has merged into this paradigm.

Third conjugation

Verbs in the third conjugation are in -ere, later merged with -ere, but -re in French and Catalan. The suffix -re in French are in the third group, also known as irregular verbs.
The -iō variant now defunct, later merged with the second conjugation; the paradigm now only exists in some descendants of the verb faciō.

Fourth conjugation

Verbs in the fourth conjugation are in -īre, later evolved to -ire in Italian, and -ir in most Romance languages. This conjugation type are infixed with once-inchoative -īsc- → *-ísc- in some languages, but its placement varies.
In Italian, Catalan, and Romanian, the infix -isc-; -esc-, -eix-, and -ăsc- is placed on once-stressed indicative and subjunctive present forms, and stressed imperatives. In French, the infix -iss- is placed on all indicative present forms, the indicative imperfect, the subjunctive present, and plural imperatives.
While there are few non-infixed -īre verbs, in French the infixed verbs are the only regular verbs, otherwise irregular.

Modern languages

While the nominal morphology in Romance languages is primarily agglutinative, the verbal morphology is fusional. The verbs are highly inflected for numbers, persons, moods, tenses, and aspects.
Because of the complexities in Romance conjugation, certain languages have a separate article regarding these conjugations:
While there are 4 regular infinitives in Classical Latin, namely -āre, -ēre, -ere, and -īre, some of these infinitive were merged. In many Romance languages including Spanish and Portuguese, the main infinitives are -ar, -er, and -ir, with addition of -ôr which only exists in the verb, traditionally considered as -er verbs. While in Italian, the infinitives are -are, -ere, -ire. The infinitives -er and -ere resulted from the merge of Latin infinitives -ēre and -ere. In French, the infinitives are -er, -oir, -re, -ir, but verbs with -oir and -re are in the third group, also known as irregular verbs.
Latin deponent verbs like and changed to active counterparts *séquo and *násco, as in Portuguese, Spanish, and Italian ; and Portuguese, Spanish, and French.

Irregularities

Orthographic variation

In many Romance languages, verb stems ending in "soft" c and g have purely orthographic variation to indicate that the soft pronunciation is intended before back vowels. Thus in Spanish lanz-ar /lanˈθaɾ/ "to throw" has a first person singular indicative form lanc-e /ˈlanθe/ "that I throw" where both c and z represent the phoneme /θ/ in different situations. Likewise there is French mang-er /mɑ̃ˈʒe/ "to eat", commenc-er /kɔmɑ̃ˈse/ "to begin", first person plural present indicative nous mange-ons /nu mɑ̃ˈʒɔ̃/ and nous commenç-ons /nu kɔmɑ̃ˈsɔ̃/.
Conversely, there may be forms with a "hard" c and g throughout, as with toc-ar /toˈkaɾ/ "to touch", toqu-é /toˈke/ "I touched". A third type in Spanish is the small group of verbs with stems ending in /gw/, as averigu-ar /abeɾiˈgwaɾ/ "to find out", averigü-é "I found out". Such alternations are purely orthographic quirks, not true irregularities.

True irregular verbs

Copula

While the passive voice became completely periphrastic in Romance, the active voice has been morphologically preserved to a greater or lesser extent. The tables below compare the conjugation of the Latin verbs and in the active voice with that of the Romance copulae, their descendants. For simplicity, only the first person singular is listed for finite forms. Note that certain forms in Romance languages come from the suppletive sources sedeo instead of sum, e.g. subjunctive present: sedea > sia, sea, seja...

Other irregular verbs

  • "To have": The verb was regularly conjugated in Classical Latin, but later tends to be highly irregular in the Romance languages. The verb later transformed to *haveō in many Romance languages, resulting in irregular indicative present forms *ai, *as, and *at, but ho, hai, ha in Italian and -pp- in Logudorese Sardinian in present tenses.
This is the Vulgar Latin conjugation of the verb *avére:
Notice that these forms sometimes also have an inconsistent form, as the table above more resembling with that of French.
  • "To do": The verb is also irregular in Classical Latin, with fēc- before perfect tenses. This verb is one of the few verbs that retains perfect ablaut in Romance languages, with some changing the perfect stem to fi- due to metaphony rules.

    Semantic changes

In spite of the remarkable continuity of form, several Latin tenses have changed meaning, especially subjunctives.
  • The gerund in Sardinian changed the final -o in -e. However, the French and Catalan suffixes -ant conflate with the accusative of present active participle suffix -āntem, and so the gerund sounds like the present participle, but ever present with "en".
  • The supine disappeared, and remains just the past participle, with its stem, in all Romance languages.
  • The pluperfect indicative became a conditional in Sicilian, and an imperfect subjunctive in Spanish.
  • The pluperfect subjunctive developed into an imperfect subjunctive in all languages except Romansh, where it became a conditional, and Romanian, where it became a pluperfect indicative.
  • The future perfect indicative became a future subjunctive in Old Spanish, Portuguese, and Galician.
The Latin imperfect subjunctive underwent a change in syntactic status, becoming a personal infinitive in Portuguese and Galician. An alternative hypothesis traces the personal infinitive back to the Latin infinitive, not to a conjugated verb form.

Periphrases

In many cases, the empty cells in the tables above exist as distinct compound verbs in the modern languages. Thus, the main tense and mood distinctions in classical Latin are still made in most modern Romance languages, though some are now expressed through compound rather than simple verbs. Some examples, from Romanian:
  • Perfect indicative: am fost, ai fost, a fost, am fost, ați fost, au fost;
  • Future indicative: voi fi, vei fi, va fi, vom fi, veți fi, vor fi;
  • Future perfect indicative: voi fi fost, vei fi fost, va fi fost, vom fi fost, veți fi fost, vor fi fost.
New forms also developed, such as the conditional, which in most Romance languages started out as a periphrasis, but later became a simple tense. In Romanian, the conditional is still periphrastic: aș fi, ai fi, ar fi, am fi, ați fi, ar fi.