Latin verbal system: how perfect and aorist joined in the new perfect?

[Stephane Goyette]

On Wed, 19 May 1999, petegray wrote:

> There is a better reason for the collapse of the inherited future system.
> With the change of /b/ to /B/ (or /v/), the classical distinction between
> future amabit, and past amavit, was no longer possible.   Both ended up
> /amaut/ > amo: (distinguished from the 1st sing present by the different
> placing of the accent - preserved in Italian to this day.)

And in Spanish as well, I might add.

> This form ended
> up as the past, and a new future was developed from the infinitive.

The problem with this position is that in a number of Romance languages
(French, Rumanian) the third person singular forms of the perfect must go
back to a contracted form *AMAT (stress on the second syllable, not on the
first as in the present tense form), not *AMAVT (Compare French CHANTA,
Rumanian CINTA and Spanish CANTO', Portuguese CANTOU). Thus, in French and
Rumanian there wouldn't have been any internal phonological motivation for
the future form AMABIT to be eliminated. Yet it was: leaving aside the
forms of the copula, there isn't a trace of the Latin future anywhere in
Romance. As for the new future developed from the infinitive (by which I
assume is meant the new synthetic future, i.e. French CHANTERA or Spanish
CANTARA), it is by no means Pan-Romance: many Southern Italian dialects,
to this day, have no future tense: in Sardinia the future is marked by
means of a reduced form of DEBERE, in Rumanian by means of a reduced form
of VOLERE...these facts clearly indicate that the future was lost at an
early date in Latin/Romance and that, at a later date, various Romance
languages created various new means to indicate futurity.

>> Classical Latin is a highly artificial literary creation.

> I would have said "highly artificial selection".   It rejects some forms
> (both morphology and grammar) but these often remained in common speech, and
> have resurfaced in late Latin and become the norm in Romance:  e.g. dico
> quod (Plautus, Vulgate, and Romance).

I see nothing artificial about Classical Latin, although it probably
eschewed some traits of the spoken language: as Witold Manczak has
argued, Vulgar Latin (or Proto-Romance, or however one cares to call the
ancestor of the Romance languages) is quite plainly a "daughter" of
Classical Latin (Not a "sister" as so many Romance scholars have argued).

Stephane Goyette.