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The accusative theory proposes that Italian -e derives from -as. One piece of evidence is that in Italian, masculine amico has plural amici with /tʃ/ (the expected palatal outcome before -Ī), but feminine amica has plural amiche, with /k/ that is unexpected if e < -AE, but expected if e < -ĀS.
On the contrary, masculine plural is generally derived from Latin second declension nominative -i; this suffix eventually drops or gives rise to palatalisation or metaphonesis; some concrete realisations are: -li > -lj > -gl > -j-ni > -nj > -gn-ti > -tj > -cc; Metaphonesis (in regression) : orti > öört; Neutralisation: -i > -∅
Lei was originally an object form of ella, which in turn referred to an honorific of the feminine gender such as la magnificenza tua/vostra ('Your Magnificence') or Vossignoria ('Your Lordship'), [18] and by analogy, Loro came to be used as the formal plural. Previously, and in some Italian regions today (e.g. Campania), voi was used as the ...
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.
Developing a gender-neutral option in Italian is linguistically challenging because the Italian language marks only the masculine and feminine grammatical genders: "friends" in Italian is either "amici" or "amiche" where the masculine "-i" pluralized ending is used as an all-encompassing term, and "amiche" with the feminine "-e" pluralized ...
Italian verbs have a high degree of inflection, the majority of which follows one of three common patterns of conjugation. Italian conjugation is affected by mood, person, tense, number, aspect and occasionally gender. The three classes of verbs (patterns of conjugation) are distinguished by the endings of the infinitive form of the verb:
The equivalents of Italian amare, mettere, and morire ('love, put, die) are amà, mette, and morì. [2] The change of older /ndʒ/ to /ɲɲ/, such that magnemo 'we eat' corresponds to Italian mangiamo. [2] Isomorphism of certain third-person plural and first-person singular verb endings, such that ama may mean either 'he/she/it loves' or 'they ...
The palatalisation in the masculine amici /aˈmitʃi/, compared with the lack of palatalisation in amiche /aˈmike/, shows that feminine -e cannot come from Latin -ae, which became /ɛː/ by the 1st century AD and would certainly have triggered palatalisation. Use of nominative -i for the masculine plural, instead of the accusative -os.