LIN376H5 Chapter Notes - Chapter 7: Stress Position, French Language, Thematic Vowel
Document Summary
The latin verb system is a product of drastic innovation on the way from indo-european. It took on a squarish architecture characterized by three binary contrasts; voice (active/passive), mood (indicative/subjunctive) and aspect (infectum/perfectum), in addition to tense. Every verb in latin has one stem throughout the infectum and another throughout the perfectum. The perfectum in latin had several historical sources; which are reflected in the four ways of forming stems; waw stems [w], sigmatic stems [s], long-vowel stems (v and reduplicated stems ([c1v] > [c1vc1v]) The waw stems are by far the most numerous. Another zone where stress position has dramatic consequences is in the romance synthetic pasts deriving from latin perfects. Athematic perfects lack a thematic vowel and are known as strong perfects they"re the main source of the irregular past tense forms in romance. Thematic vowels gain prominence in spoken latin and become a force in haping.
