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Christophe wrote: > En réponse à Mangiat <mangiat@hidden.email>: > > > > > Certainly not;-) inf.: vess > > pres. (I will include also pronouns and pronominal proclitics): mi (a) > > sont > > [mI a suNt], ti te seet [tI te se:t], lù/lee l'è [lY lE]/[le: lE], nun > > (a) > > semm [nYN a sEm], vialter (a) sii [vjalter a si:], lor (i) hinn [lu:r > > jIn]. > > > > And I thought Romance languages were not exotic enough to my taste :))) . Your > dialect also features these strange personal clitics. Where do they come from? Lombard and other Northern Italian languages developed this system almost the same way French is doing nowadays: moi je parle Français = Lomb.: mi a parli Franzes, where _mi_ (originally the accusative pron.) is used nowadays also as as a nominative, _a_ is the offspring of a cliticized _ego_; in most dialects proclitic pronouns consisting of just a vowel (a, i) are generally left out (perhaps because of the frequent assimilation occurring with the ending vowel of the previous word), only _te_ (2sg) and _el/la_(3sgm/f) are compulsory. > Grammaticalisation of the personal pronouns in subject position which went so > far that they lost meaning, until people had to reuse the subject pronouns > despite their presence? Yes. Take a look at the forms _ti te voeuret_ [tI te v9ret] 'you(sg.) want' and _vialter a voeurov_ 'you (pl.) want' [vjalter a v9ruf] (the latter is not 'standard' Lombard, ie Milanese; but the ending -ov is present also in Milanese in the impf. tense). Their history is really amazing: VL.: VOLIS > vor = vor < VOLO (1s); a clitic -et from the pronoun _te_ was added: voret, probably to avoid confusion with 1s (later this 1s form gained the ending -i the same way French nowadays we'd expect -0: AMO should give _aim_ in Fr., while we have _aime_); later also the proclitic _te_ was attached in front of the root in analogy with _a_, _i_, _el_, _la_ used with 1s, 3s, 1-2-3pl. Finally _ti_ started to be used as a _moi_, _toi_ are used nowadays in French. As for _vialter a voeurov_ the ending _-ov_ dates back to a cliticized _vu_, 'you'. > What surprises me is that they ever were felt necessary > enough to become mandatory (I could understand it from a language like French > which lost most of its conjugation suffixes, but it doesn't appear in French as > much as in Friulan, whereas Friulan didn't lose much of its endings!!). Surprising, isn't it? ;-) Wanna listen some Lombard? It's a muribund language (I am one of the very few 18yrs olders who actually can speak it), but a Lombard singer from a nearby village, Davide Bernasconi with his 'Van de Sfroos band' (_vann de sfros_ means 'smugglers'- a typical job on the Swiss border), has reached the 14th position some months ago amongst the national hits: take a look at www.cauboi.it... There's also a yahoogroup in Lombard, _milanes_ (the trafic is minimal: if anyone wants to join...:-) Luca