Linguistic characteristics of the Romance languages

In the passage from Latin to Romance, verbal inflection has survived much more than noun declension. Although the four regular Latin conjugations have been virtually reduced to two, with only the -a- class remaining truly productive, other features of the verb seem almost unchanged. In most languages, for instance, the person markers are directly traceable to Latin origins (i.e., to Latin -ō, -s, -t, -mus, -tis, -nt). Modern spoken French is the only major language in which the personal endings no longer serve the same function as in Latin. Today, person is marked in French principally by pronouns derived mainly from the Latin emphatic nominative forms of the personal pronoun: J’aime /Ʒɛm/ ‘I love,’ tu aimes /tyɛm/ ‘you love’ from (ego) amo, (tu) amas. The creoles have taken this process even further, in that their verb forms are usually invariable but are prefixed by elements indicating person, tense, aspect, and so on, as in many West African languages: Louisiana French /motegẽ/ ‘I was having’ from mon /mo/ étais /te/ gagner /gẽ/; and similarly /ilagẽ/ ‘he will have.’

In the metropolitan languages, verbal modalities are shown, as in Latin, by inflection. Some Latin verb endings, such as that of the -r passive or of the future, have disappeared; others, such as the pluperfect indicative and subjunctive, have survived in a few languages with modified function. But most modern languages have reflexes of the present, perfect, and imperfect indicatives and of one or more subjunctive tenses. The imperfect indicative, a Latin innovation, survives almost intact, though the evolution of its form, not to mention its function, presents problems. The -ī- stem form in Latin -iēba- is thought to have coalesced early with the -ē- stem -ēba- form, but a few modern languages (notably Italian, Friulian, and some Spanish and Portuguese dialects) have reflexes of an -ība- form that might have survived from popular Latin. The Latin -āba- form survives almost everywhere, though in most French dialects its older reflexes, -eve and -oue, have been replaced in modern times by forms derived from Latin -ēba-. These latter are thought to be widespread but are puzzling phonologically as they have very often irregularly lost their -b- (Spanish, Portuguese, and others -ía, French -ais).

The Latin perfect of the type amāvit ‘he has loved’ is known by all the literary languages but is rare in speech in French, Italian, and Romanian, in which it has been replaced by a new compound past made up of the verb for ‘to have’ and a past participle. The latter structure is known to some extent in all Romance languages, often being used to express a more-recent past than the preterite amāvit form, which also indicates action in the past (without reference to duration or repetition): Romanian am cîntat, Italian ho cantato, French j’ai chanté, Spanish he cantado, Old Portuguese hei cantado, Engadine ha chantà, hè chantò, Sardinian kantau appo, from Latin habeo cantatum ‘I have sung.’ In modern Portuguese the preferred auxiliary is ter ‘to have, to hold’ rather than haver, producing forms such as tenho cantado, whereas modern Catalan has two forms of the perfect, the pan-Romance type (he cantat) and a specific type that uses the verb for ‘to go’ plus the infinitive (vaig cantar), semantically different.

The disappearance of the Latin future has been remedied in most Romance languages by the development of new forms of periphrastic origin. Many of these forms use some reflex of habēre ‘to have’ joined to an infinitive. From Latin cantāre habēo ‘I will sing’ are derived Italian canterò, Spanish, Catalan cantaré, Portuguese cantarei, French je chanterai, Rhaetian c(h)antero, c(h)antera, Occitan cantarai; habēo cantāre gives southern Italian aggio cantà (similar forms are seen in earlier Spanish, Portuguese, and northern Italian). Latin habēo ad cantāre produces Sardinian ap’ a kantare, and habēo de cantāre gives Portuguese hei-de cantar (more popular than cantarei).

A periphrastic future of the type shown in English ‘I’m going to sing’ enjoys popularity in Romance, mainly to indicate a less distant future event than the more formal future tense (e.g., French je vais chanter, Spanish voy a cantar). Other periphrases used in Romance are ‘I will (wish to) sing,’ as in Romanian voi cînta; ‘I must sing,’ as in Sardinian deppo kantare; ‘I’m coming to sing,’ Sursilvan jeu vegnel a cantar; and ‘I have that I should sing,’ as in popular Romanian am să cînt. Notably, Dalmatian does not seem to know periphrastic Romance futures but uses a form kantuora (perhaps from Latin cantāverō) as both future and conditional.

The Romance conditional, or “future in the past,” a form not found in Latin, is in many languages related to the new future tense. In the Western languages it is composed of the future stem (or infinitive) plus a past-tense marker related to reflexes of habēre. In some cases an imperfect form is used, in others a perfect form; examples are French je chanterais ‘I would sing,’ Spanish, Portuguese, Occitan, and Catalan cantaría, and Italian canterei, -ebbe, and so on. In Romanian the conditional marker can either precede or follow the infinitive and may be derived from the imperfect of vrea ‘to wish’: for example, aş cînta, ar cînta, and so on, or (obsolete and dialectal) cîntare-aş, cîntare-ar, and so on.