R: Re: Romance Verbal endings

> On Sat, Nov 18, 2000 at 06:02:23PM -0800, Barry Garcia wrote:
> > I was contemplating ways to make Montreiano's verbs a little different,
> > and started to wonder: Is it plausible for the -ir endings to collapse
> > into the -er class of verbs? I know that in Spanish, it seems the -er
verb
> > class hasn't been very productive, and some have been adopted into
the -ir
> > class of verbs. I was thinking it would be nice to have just two
classes,
> > -er, and -ar, but I want it to also be somewhat realistic. Thoughts?
I don't know how does your system work, but in Italian a mix -are + -ere
versus -ire would be more plausible, because the -ire class is formed by
incohative verbs which take the -isc suffix before the ending. This means
that the ending of the first two conjugations are more similar:

amare (to love): amo, ami, ama, amiamo, amate, amano

leggere (to read): leggo, leggi, legge, leggiamo, leggete, leggono

capire (to understand): capisco, capisci, capisce, capiamo, capite,
capiscono

Your hypotesis would work if 1) you delete the -isc infix; 2) you consider
such verbs as a particular subclass of the -er verbs (the endings, indeed,
after the -isc infix, are the same).

Luca

> Sounds realistic to me. From what I've read, it seems that it's not that
> important what the original Latin infinitive ending was; factors such as
> what vowel the root of the verb has and whether the verb is active or
> stative are more important. In my mind at least that suggests something
like
> a merger.
>
> --
> Eric Christopherson / *Aiworegs Ghristobhorosyo
>