From: Christophe Grandsire (christophe.grandsire@free.fr)
Date: Tue May 21 2002 - 22:19:49 EST
En réponse à Adam Walker <dreamertwo@hotmail.com>:
>
> While many of these Romance terms are clearly derived from the Latin
> word,
> many others are clearly NOT and some I'm just not quite sure about.
>
Well, be careful, since even some which *look* like they come from the Latin
term actually don't :)) . They come from suppletive forms that happen to look
like the Latin forms but not exactly :)) .
> It would seem that only 6 of the infinitives (Cat. Occ. Ita. Sard. R-R
> and
> Sic.) come from the Latin infinitive. Whence do the otheres derive?
>
In fact none comes from the Latin infinitive. ESSE existed only in Classical
Latin. The ones you're talking about come from the *Vulgar* Latin ESSERE.
French comes from STARE: to stand up, Spanish from SEDERE: to sit. I'd guess
Romanian comes from FI: to become, though I wouldn't bet on it...
> With the Present 1st sg it looks like 6 come from sum.
>
> With the 2nd sg and 2nd pl it looks like only 2 come from the Latin.
>
> I'm assuming that the others are suppletive forms and not out right
> coinages. Which verms do the other forms come from???
>
The suppletive forms of "to be", like in English, come from verbs of similar
meaning. STARE is quite common (like in French, but not in Spanish where it
made a second "to be" verb: estar), others can be too. Some probably come from
a conjugation of ESSERE, others from the conjugations of ESSE (Vulgar Latin
happily mixed both, and differently in different dialects, depending on where
the analogical phenomena that created ESSERE occured :)) ). Add to that
analogy, borrowing, addition of new endings from other verbs (well, that's
analogy too, actually :)) ), all things that are quite common with irregular
verbs, and you get the result: forms that are not readily comparable :)) .
Christophe.
http://rainbow.conlang.free.fr
Take your life as a movie: do not let anybody else play the leading role.
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