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Lei was originally an object form of ella, which in turn referred to an honorific of the feminine gender such as la magnificenza tua/vostra ('Your Magnificence') or Vossignoria ('Your Lordship'), [18] and by analogy, Loro came to be used as the formal plural. Previously, and in some Italian regions today (e.g. Campania), voi was used as the ...
On the contrary, masculine plural is generally derived from Latin second declension nominative -i; this suffix eventually drops or gives rise to palatalisation or metaphonesis; some concrete realisations are: -li > -lj > -gl > -j-ni > -nj > -gn-ti > -tj > -cc; Metaphonesis (in regression) : orti > öört; Neutralisation: -i > -∅
Italian verbs have a high degree of inflection, the majority of which follows one of three common patterns of conjugation. Italian conjugation is affected by mood, person, tense, number, aspect and occasionally gender. The three classes of verbs (patterns of conjugation) are distinguished by the endings of the infinitive form of the verb:
In spite of traditional standards of Italian grammar, some Italians in recent years have opted to start using the pronoun "loro" (a literal translation of English "they"), to refer to people who desire to be identified with a gender neutral pronoun, although this usage may be perceived as incorrect due to the plural agreement of verbs.
Similar to Portuguese; the indefinite article "unha" (fem. plural), the suffix -ción and a heavier usage of the letter "x" usually sign Galician. Definite articles o (masc. sing.), os (masc. plural), a (fem. sing.), as (fem. plural) Common diagraphs: nh (ningunha) The letters j, k, w and y are not in the alphabet, and appear only in loanwords
The accusative theory proposes that Italian -e derives from -as. One piece of evidence is that in Italian, masculine amico has plural amici with /tʃ/ (the expected palatal outcome before -Ī), but feminine amica has plural amiche, with /k/ that is unexpected if e < -AE, but expected if e < -ĀS.
Some Romance languages form plurals by adding /s/ (derived from the plural of the Latin accusative case), while others form the plural by changing the final vowel (by influence of Latin nominative plural endings, such as /i/) from some masculine nouns. Plural in /s/: Portuguese, Galician, Spanish, Catalan, [25] Occitan, Sardinian, Friulian ...
Romance languages have a number of shared features across all languages: Romance languages are moderately inflecting, i.e. there is a moderately complex system of affixes (primarily suffixes) that are attached to word roots to convey grammatical information such as number, gender, person, tense, etc. Verbs have much more inflection than nouns.