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En réponse à Adam Walker <dreamertwo@hidden.email>: > > 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.