Re: LANGUE NATURELLE: Les groupes des verbes en Français (Re: TECH: Official languages of the list)

On Thu, Aug 19, 2004 at 09:10:03PM +0100, Joe wrote:
> Trebor Jung wrote:
> The '-er' verbs mostly come from Latin '-are' and, I think,
> 'ére'(Hence Spanish 'cantar' to French 'chanter'),
And It. cantare, all from Latin cantāre.

> the '-re' verbs come from '-ere', I think
> (Spanish 'vender', French 'vendre').
Both from Latin "vendere", which was usually encountered in CL via its
passive form "venire".

Classical Latin had four verb conjugations, seem to have collapsed to
fewer in the Romance languages.  The four CL conjugations were:

1st: āre        (long) A-stem
2nd: ēre        long   E-stem
3rd: ere        short  E-stem
4th: īre        (long) I-stem

The 3rd conjugation was further subdivided, as some verbs regularly
inserted an -i- between the stem and a certain subset of the endings.

In Spanish, the 1st conjugation verbs became -ar verbs; the
2nd and 3rd conjugation verbs became -er verbs; and the 4th
conjugation verbs became -ir verbs.  Which seems eminently logical.

The French, of course, Had To Be Different. ;-)  While the fourth
conjugation verbs went to -ir, as in Spanish, the other three were
treated differently.  French has no -ar verbs; the 1st and 2nd
conjugation verbs merged in -er, while the 3rd became -re.  (In both
cases, the final form is due to a reduction from short E to zero in part
of the ending: -e:r(e) -> -er, -(e)re -> -re.)

-Marcos

Reply