Romance verbs refers to the verbs of the Romance languages. In the transition from Latin to the Romance languages, verbs went through many phonetic, syntactic, and semantic changes. Most of the distinctions present in classical Latin continued to be made, but synthetic forms were often replaced with analytic ones. Other verb forms changed meaning, and new forms also appeared.
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Comparison of conjugations
The following tables present a comparison of the conjugation of the regular verb amare "to love" in Classical Latin, and Vulgar Latin (reconstructed), and five modern Romance languages.
- Literary.
- Its meaning has mostly shifted to that of an imperfect subjunctive in modern Spanish. It is now usually interchangeable with amase, amases, amase, etc. Nevertheless, a few rare uses as a pluperfect subsist.
- Its meaning has shifted to that of a future subjunctive in Spanish and Portuguese.
- Reanalysed as a personal infinitive. See below.
- Its meaning has shifted to that of an imperfect subjunctive in most Romance languages. But note the normal use, in modern south-eastern Umbrian of amassimo instead of standard Italian amammo to express an indicative past perfect.
- Disused.
- The future indicative tense of the modern languages does not derive from the Latin form (which tended to be confounded with the preterite due to sound changes in Vulgar Latin), but rather from an infinitive + HABEO periphrasis, later reanalysed as a simple tense.
- Fell into disuse in modern Portuguese. It's found only in old literary texts. Nowadays it's largely replaced by Compound forms "tinha amado" or "havia amado" (had loved).
Note that the Vulgar Latin reconstructions are believed to have normalized word stress on the penultimate syllable and that the nasal vowels (marked with ~) were probably commonly realized as their non-nasal counterparts. Word-final <e>s probably converged on /ə/.
Copula
While the passive voice became completely periphrastic in Romance, the active voice has been morphologically preserved to a greater or lesser extent. The tables below compare the conjugation of the Latin verbs sum and sto in the active voice with that of the Romance copulae, their descendants. For simplicity, only the first person singular is listed for finite forms. Note that certain forms in romance languages come from the suppletive verb sedeo (to be sit down) instead of sum, e.g. subjunctive present: sedea > sia, sea, seja... (medieval Galician-Portuguese, for instance, had double forms in the whole conjugation: sou/sejo, era/sia, fui/sevi, fora/severa, fosse/sevesse...)
- The future indicative tense does not derive from the Latin form (which tended to be confounded with the preterite due to sound changes in Vulgar Latin), but rather from an infinitive + HABEO periphrasis, later reanalysed as a simple tense.
- Formally identical to the future perfect indicative except in the first person singular. The two paradigms merged in Vulgar Latin.
Semantic changes
In spite of the remarkable continuity of form, several Latin tenses have changed meaning, especially subjunctives.
The Latin imperfect subjunctive underwent a change in syntactic status, becoming a personal infinitive in Portuguese and Galician. An alternative hypothesis traces the personal infinitive back to the Latin infinitive, not to a conjugated verb form.
Periphrases
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:
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.