Romance verbs

The following table presents a comparison of the conjugation of the regular verb cantare "to sing" in Classical Latin, and Vulgar Latin (reconstructed as Proto-Italo-Western Romance, with stress marked), and diverse languages derived from Latin. The conjugations below were given from their respective Wiktionary pages.

Note that the Vulgar Latin reconstructions are believed to have regularized word stress within each tense (except the present and imperative). Word-final ⟨e⟩ probably converged on /ə/. Many verb forms have undergone elisions, like the indicative pluperfect cantāveram > *cantára and the subjunctive imperfect cantāvissem > *cantásse.

In this section, "Vulgar Latin" is actually reconstructed as reconstructed Proto-Italo-Western Romance, most notably the shift from Classical Latin -i- and -u- to -e- /e/ and -o- /o/, as opposed to inherited /ɛ/ and /ɔ/ respectively. The developments include:

• The -v- of the perfect tenses were dropped or elided, but sometimes become /u/ after vowels.
• The past participle were sometimes sporadically rounded to *-Å«-, this situation is preserved in French.
• The "unstressed" indicative imperfect is very likely from shortened *-bămus, *-bătis, yielding to the stress on the third-from-last syllable (cantā́bămus), as opposed to Classical Latin stress on the second-from-last syllable (cantābā́mus). Languages which retain this irregular stress were the languages of Iberia, Sicilian, and French.
• Romance metaphony. In forms containing -Ä« next to mid-open vowels, especially in preterite forms were heightened.

In the Proto-Romance grammatical tradition, the second and third conjugation are known as third conjugation, similarly to French.

While the nominal morphology in Romance languages is primarily agglutinative, the verbal morphology is fusional. The verbs are highly inflected for numbers (singular and plural), persons (first-, second-, and third-person), moods (indicative, conditional, subjunctive, and imperative), tenses (present, past, future), and aspects (imperfective and perfective).

Because of the complexities in Romance conjugation, certain languages have a separate article regarding these conjugations:

• Italian conjugation
• Spanish verbs
• Portuguese verb conjugation
• Romanian verbs
• French conjugation
• Catalan verbs
• Occitan conjugation
• Sardinian conjugation

While there are 4 regular infinitives in Classical Latin, namely -āre, -ēre, -ere, and -īre, some of these infinitive were merged. In many Romance languages including Spanish and Portuguese, the main infinitives are -ar, -er, and -ir, with addition of -ôr (Portuguese only) which only exists in the verb pôr, traditionally considered as -er verbs. While in Italian, the infinitives are -are, -ere, -ire. The infinitives -er and -ere (Italian) resulted from the merge of Latin infinitives -ēre and -ere. In French, the infinitives are -er, -oir, -re, -ir, but verbs with -oir and -re are in the third group, also known as irregular verbs.

Latin deponent verbs like sequor and nascor (infinitive sequī, nascī) changed to active counterparts *séquo and *násco (infinitive *séquere, *nascere), as in Portuguese seguir, Spanish seguir, and Italian seguire; and Portuguese nascer, Spanish nacer, and French naître.

In spite of the remarkable continuity of form, several Latin tenses have changed meaning, especially subjunctives.

• The gerund in Sardinian changed the final -o in -e (like the Proto-Romance present participle accusative form, estinguished, in Sardinian). However, the French and Catalan suffixes -ant conflate with the accusative of present active participle suffix -āntem, and so the gerund sounds like the present participle, but ever present with "en".
• The supine disappeared, and remains just the past participle, with its stem, in all Romance languages.
• The pluperfect indicative became a conditional in Sicilian, and an imperfect subjunctive in Spanish.
• The pluperfect subjunctive developed into an imperfect subjunctive in all languages except Romansh, where it became a conditional, and Romanian, where it became a pluperfect indicative.
• The future perfect indicative became a future subjunctive in Old Spanish, Portuguese, and Galician.

The Latin imperfect subjunctive underwent a change in syntactic status, becoming a personal infinitive in Portuguese and Galician.^[2] An alternative hypothesis traces the personal infinitive back to the Latin infinitive, not to a conjugated verb form.^[3]

In many cases, the empty cells in the tables above exist as distinct compound verbs in the modern languages. Thus, the main tense and mood distinctions in classical Latin are still made in most modern Romance languages, though some are now expressed through compound rather than simple verbs. Some examples, from Romanian:

• Perfect indicative: am fost, ai fost, a fost, am fost, ați fost, au fost;
• Future indicative: voi fi, vei fi, va fi, vom fi, veți fi, vor fi;
• Future perfect indicative: voi fi fost, vei fi fost, va fi fost, vom fi fost, veți fi fost, vor fi fost.

New forms also developed, such as the conditional, which in most Romance languages started out as a periphrasis, but later became a simple tense. In Romanian, the conditional is still periphrastic: aș fi, ai fi, ar fi, am fi, ați fi, ar fi.

• Romance languages
• Vulgar Latin