Practising verbs

For the third time I met Sanne in Tamk, and we try to improve our grammars knoledges teaching each other something about the most important part of any sentence: the verb!

The first thing was to learn how to say personal pronouns. we started from Dutch, but here I will report also the italian version all together to make it more clear.

I                               ik                                                        io

you                         je / jij / u (formal version)       tu

he/ she / it           hij / zij / het                                  lui / lei / egli (generic, no neutral form)

we                           wij / we                                           noi

you                         jullie                                                 voi

they                        zij                                                      essi / loro

While I was teaching the Italian forms to Sanne I suddenly realized that in formal situation we can use both “lei” (3rd person female), “voi” (2nd pers. plur.) or “loro” (3rd pers. plur.). This varies according to wrhich region of the Italian speaker belongs to, the standard version is the use of “lei”.If the person is very important (and a little bit arrogant maybe) can even use pluralis maiestatis (latin expression) to refer to himself!

The we moved to verbs. Dutch has only one scheme for the conjugation of the verbs (and quite easy for me actually), in which the first person is the root of the verb, second and third persons singular add -t and all the plural forms add -en. I learnt also the main verbs to be (zijn) and to have (hebben).

Unfortunately for Sanne the conjugation of italian verbs is much more complicated. It has 3 different schemes according to the termination of the infinitive form of the verb, and every form is different from the others. So there are many differences between to love (amare), to believe (credere) and to hear (sentire) The verbs to be (essere) and to have (avere) are so irregular that they need their schemes. Poor Sanne!

Carlo Soregotti

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