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Re: [romanceconlang] Romance to be



Adam wrote:

> 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.
>
> 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?

All the infinities you listed - except the Rumanian one- are from Lat.
infinitive 'essere'. Spanish and Portuguese did undergo apocope: essere >
(es)sere > ser(e); French went this way: essere > estre > e^tre; Rumanian on
the other hand seems to derive its verb 'to be' from Latin fieri 'to
become'.

> With the Present 1st sg it looks like 6 come from sum.

All of them are from _sum_. -c is quite a common ending in Catalan to mark
1sg: crec means 'I believe'... Rumanian _sint_ really looks like my Lombard
_sont_ [suNt]!

> With the 2nd sg and 2nd pl it looks like only 2 come from the Latin.

Where you meet an initial _s_, as in Italian _sei_, _siete_, Sicilian _si_,
_siti_, _, Lombard _seet_ [se:t], _sii_ [si:] that's analogy with the _s_ in
the 1st sg. + the regular ending (from Latin -tis).

> I'm assuming that the others are suppletive forms and not out right
> coinages.  Which verms do the other forms come from???

If you are interested in odd forms, here's archaic Italian _enno_, Ligurian
_en_, Lombard _hinn_, meaning _they are_; or take a look also at Piedmontese
with its cool ending -oma for 1 pl. which applies also for verb 'to be':
soma [suma] (cantoma [kaN'tuma] we sing). Italian 'dialects' are
morphological treasures.

Luca