Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
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 ...
The Spanish copulas are ser and estar.The latter developed as follows: stare → *estare → estar. The copula ser developed from two Latin verbs. Thus its inflectional paradigm is a combination: most of it derives from svm (to be) but the present subjunctive appears to come from sedeo (to sit) via the Old Spanish verb seer.
Another major systemic change was to the future tense, remodelled in Vulgar Latin with auxiliary verbs. A new future was originally formed with the auxiliary verb habere, *amare habeo, literally "to love I have" (cf. English "I have to love", which has shades of a future meaning). This was contracted into a new future suffix in Western Romance ...
This means that, although the infinitive active form normally shows the verb conjugation, knowledge of several different forms is necessary to be able to confidently produce the full range of forms for any particular verb. In a dictionary, Latin verbs are listed with four "principal parts" (or fewer for deponent and defective verbs), which ...
Irregular nouns and verbs tended to be either regularized or replaced with preexisting regular equivalents. Cf. the loss of edere 'to eat' in favour of manducare or its own regularized compound comedere.
Romance languages have a number of shared features across all languages: Romance languages are moderately inflecting, i.e. there is a moderately complex system of affixes (primarily suffixes) that are attached to word roots to convey grammatical information such as number, gender, person, tense, etc. Verbs have much more inflection than nouns.
The distinction between Latin short -n-, -l-and long -nn-, -ll-was preserved by means of palatalizing -nn-, -ll-to /ɲ, ʎ/, as in Latin annum > Spanish año, Catalan any vs. Latin manum > Spanish mano, Old Calatan man (modern Catalan mà). This also affects some initial L in Catalan.
Latin inflection can result in words with much ambiguity: For example, amābit, "he/she/it will love", is formed from amā-, a future tense morpheme -bi-and a third person singular morpheme, -t, the last of which -t does not express masculine, feminine, or neuter gender. A major task in understanding Latin phrases and clauses is to clarify such ...