The Romance languages in their diversity reflect the fact that Latin spread, with the expansion of Roman power, to regions where people learned it as adults, untutored. It is not far wrong to say that Latin passed through such a stage in every region where it was ever spoken. These conditions tended to foster change in favor of whatever the learner found easier.

We saw that the Romance languages ended up with larger phonemic inventories than that of Latin. In the realm of morphology, however, the Latin system was partially dismantled, certain distinctions were effaced, and new systems emerged, varying kaleidoscopically across the new languages.

Did the Romance languages “simplify” the Latin system? You decide. In the present tense, given that stem allomorphy is rare in Latin and rife in Romance (§ 6.6), you might well conclude that Latin was simpler.

Two principles become evident in Romance morphological change, chiefly in verb stems. First, there is a perpetual tension between the phonological changes that create allomorphy in the paradigms, and the force of analogy that tends to regularize paradigms. Second, regularizing does not always mean that a paradigm ends up with a single invariant stem morpheme. Rather, paradigms may gravitate by analogy toward some favored pattern of allomorphy. This chapter and the next present a panoramic overview of the Latin verb system and how it evolved in Italian, Spanish, and French.

Infinitives

Verbs in Romance, as in Latin, are divided into conjugation classes, represented here by their infinitives.