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Romance verbs "to be" - "to go" | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Questions About Your Target Languages |  | |
| outcast Bilingual Heptaglot Senior Member China Joined 4953 days ago 869 posts - 1364 votes  Speaks: Spanish*, English*, German, Italian, French, Portuguese, Mandarin Studies: Korean | Message 1 of 3 03 March 2012 at 7:56pm | IP Logged |
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In French, the passé simple of aller is allais, allas, alla, etc... fairly regular conjugation.
Yet the expression "Il s'en fut", which is almost exclusively an isolated expression regarding movement (to go away from a location), uses what would otherwise be the past historic of être, and it's only used to mean "leaving a place" in this context. I have almost no doubt that this is very likely a linguistic atavism of what one observes in Spanish and Portuguese: the verbs "ser" and "ir" (identical in both languages), have separate conjugations of course... BUT in the simple past, they are in fact identical! yo fui, tu fuiste, el fue, nostros fuimos, ellos fueron (both for "ser" and "ir") In fact, a considerable number of native speakers of Spanish and Portuguese are usually astounded when they are confronted with the apodictic evidence that both verbs (otherwise so distinct in meaning), share the same forms in the simple past. In French and Italian however, essere/andare and être/aller have distinct forms in the simple past (although in both languages, this tense is in formal disuse or de facto desuetude, with some exceptions in the case of Italian in the south). After ruminating on the subject, I was wondering if anyone had noticed the above features before, so patent yet concealed, and perhaps could contribute or share knowledge as to why the past forms of these two verbs coalesced in Spanish and Portuguese. And also any insight on the French use of the above expression: is it a fossilized expression that was influenced by Spanish, or did at one time "aller" also share simple past endings with "être"? Edited by outcast on 03 March 2012 at 8:07pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Cabaire Senior Member Germany Joined 5603 days ago 725 posts - 1352 votes | Message 2 of 3 03 March 2012 at 11:19pm | IP Logged |
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The Latin verb for "to go", ire, has very short stems. So some of its forms were replaced in the Roman languages by fuller forms of andare, anar, aller. And the perfect forms of esse (fui, fuisti, fuit ...), i.e. "to be", were used in Spanish and Portuguese for the simple past of "to go" as well.
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| Medulin Tetraglot Senior Member Croatia Joined 4672 days ago 1199 posts - 2192 votes Speaks: Croatian*, English, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Norwegian, Hindi, Nepali | Message 3 of 3 05 March 2012 at 3:59am | IP Logged |
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In Italian, IRE is a Tuscan dialectalism.
It lacks many forms, but it has all compound forms and some simple forms. Imperfetto: io ivo, tu ivi, egli iva, -, - essi ivano Passato remoto: tu isti, essi irono Edited by Medulin on 05 March 2012 at 6:46am 1 person has voted this message useful |
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