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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.
Italian is the least divergent language from Latin, ... and vowel changes rather than /s/ are used to mark the plural: ... amiche "female friend(s)" (cf. Romanian ...
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 > -∅
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 plural of masculine nouns in these dialects ends in -os, which does not trigger metaphony, unlike in the singular (vs. Italian plural -i, which does trigger metaphony). Sardinian has allophonic raising of mid vowels /ɛ ɔ/ to [e o] before final /i/ or /u/.
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 ...
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.
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 ...