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 phonological, 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, and five modern Romance languages.
Note that the Vulgar Latin reconstructions are believed to have regularized word stress within each tense. Word-final probably converged on.

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 instead of sum, e.g. subjunctive present: sedea > sia, sea, seja...
  1. The future indicative tense does not derive from the Latin form, but rather from an infinitive + HABEO periphrasis, later reanalysed as a simple tense.
  2. Formally identical to the future perfect indicative, the two paradigms merged in Vulgar Latin.

    Semantic changes

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