Romance verbs

Romance verbs refers to the verbs of the Romance languages. In the transition from Latin to the Romance languages, verbs went through many phonetic, syntactic, and semantic changes. Most of the distinctions present in classical Latin continued to be made, but synthetic forms were often replaced with analytic ones. Other verb forms changed meaning, and new forms also appeared.

Morphological changes

Comparison of conjugations

The following tables present a comparison of the conjugation of the regular verb amare "to love" in Classical Latin, and Vulgar Latin (reconstructed), and four modern Romance languages.

Note that the Vulgar Latin reconstructions are believed to have normalized word stress on the penultimate syllable and that the nasal vowels (marked with ^~) were probably commonly realized as their non-nasal counterparts. Word-final <e>s probably converged on /ə/.

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 sum and sto 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 verb sedeo (to be sit down) instead of sum, e.g. subjunctive present: sedea > sia, sea, seja... (medieval Galician-Portuguese, for instance, had double forms in the whole conjugation: sou/sejo, era/sia, fui/sevi, fora/severa, fosse/sevesse...)

Semantic changes

In spite of the remarkable continuity of form, several Latin tenses have changed meaning, especially subjunctives.

• The supine became a past participle in all Romance languages.
• The pluperfect indicative became a conditional in and 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 perfect subjunctive 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.^[1] An alternative hypothesis traces the personal infinitive back to the Latin infinitive, not to a conjugated verb form.^[2]

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.

See also

• Romance languages
• Vulgar Latin

Notes

References

• Maurer, Theodoro H. (1968). O infinitivo flexionado português: estudo histórico-descritivo (in Portuguese). São Paulo: Companhia Editora Nacional. 
• Osborne, Bruce (1982). "On the origin of the Portuguese inflected infinitive". In Anders Ahlqvist. Papers from the Fifth International Conference on Historical Linguistics, Galway, April 6–10 1981. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company. pp. 243–48. ISBN 978-90-272-3514-5. 
• Williams, Edwin Bucher (1962). From Latin to Portuguese: Historical phonology and morphology of the Portuguese language (2nd ed.). Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. 
• Wireback, Kenneth J. (1994). "The Origin of the Portuguese Inflected Infinitive". Hispania 77 (3): 544–554. doi:10.2307/344992.