# When did romance copula take on their modern meanings?



## killerbee256

I thinking how does one say "Hello, how are in? latin, and the first thing that came to mind was "_salvete, quōmodo stas?_" but then I realized that stare didn't mean "to be" in classical Latin. So I'm wondering when did Latin _stare_ take on the meaning "to be" instead of "to stand." I would think this would have taken place by the 5th or 6th century as it's common to all romance languages, does it show up with this meaning in any literature, Roman plays or graffiti with that meaning earlier then that time?


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## berndf

killerbee256 said:


> I thinking how does one say "Hello, how are in? latin, and the first thing that came to mind was "_salvete, quōmodo stas?_" but then I realized that stare didn't mean "to be" in classical Latin. So I'm wondering when did Latin _stare_ take on the meaning "to be" instead of "to stand." I would think this would have taken place by the 5th or 6th century as it's common to all romance languages, does it show up with this meaning in any literature, Roman plays or graffiti with that meaning earlier then that time?


I don't understand. What make you think _stare _changed its meaning from _to stand, to remain_ to _to be_ in all or at least most Romance languages?

French: no
Italian: no
Spanish: Sort of.
Romanian: no
...


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## merquiades

> In Vulgar Latin a second copula developed utilizing the verb stare , which originally meant (and is cognate with) "to stand" to denote a more temporary meaning..... The semantic shift that underlies this evolution is more or less as follows: A speaker of Classical Latin might have said... : vir est in foro , meaning "the man is at the marketplace". The same sentence in Vulgar Latin should have been * (h)omo stat in foru , "the man stands at the marketplace", replacing the est  (from esse ) with stat  (from stare ), because "standing" was what was perceived as what the man was actually doing. The use of stare  in this case was still actually correct assuming that it meant "to stand", but soon the shift from essere  to stare  became more wide-spread, and, in the end, essere  only denoted natural qualities that would not change.



Well, it seems like _stare_ had evolved to mean "to be" in Vulgar Latin and was used along _esse_, so it did pass into all the Romance Languages from the start.  However the intricate differences between the two verbs as found in Spanish only came about much later in the Iberian-peninsula environment.  Also if French does not have two verbs today, it's not because it took the older Classical Latin model.  The two verbs "essre or estre < essere" and "ester or eter < stare" became so close phonetically they ended up merging, "essre/estre" for present tenses, future, conditional, past simple", "ester/eter" for the participles, infinitive, imperfect.

For the particular uses of these verbs in each romance language the wikipedia article seems well written to me.

These verbs were already discussed amply in another thread, but maybe as a side topic I think, so I don't remember what it was called.


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## CapnPrep

merquiades said:


> The two verbs "essre or estre < essere" and "ester or eter < stare" became so close phonetically they ended up merging, "essre/estre" for present tenses, future, conditional, past simple", "ester/eter" for the participles, infinitive, imperfect.


You also included the infinitive in an earlier post, but I don't see how you can go from _stare_ to _estre_. As berndf noted in that thread, _essere _> _estre_ is the straightforward, accepted derivation. Also, have you seen the form _eter_ attested anywhere?


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## exgerman

CapnPrep said:


> but I don't see how you can go from _stare_ to _estre_.


 The insertion of a helping E or I before an initial consonant cluster starting with S is one of the basic changes from Latin to Romance.


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## CapnPrep

exgerman said:


> The insertion of a helping E or I before an initial consonant cluster starting with S is one of the basic changes from Latin to Romance.


I know, but that gives us French _estér_, not _éstre_.


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## exgerman

CapnPrep said:


> I know, but that gives us French _estér_, not _éstre_.



Remember that _stare_ and _dare_ are not really 1st conjugation verbs in Latin, although they look like it when you don't mark length. Their A is short throughout (except in the 2nd person singular of the present), and that of _stare_ is unaccented in the infinitive once the epenthetic E appears.


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## CapnPrep

exgerman said:


> Remember that _stare_ and _dare_ are not really 1st conjugation verbs in Latin, although they look like it when you don't mark length.


 This is what they look like when you mark length: _stāre _and _dăre_.


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## exgerman

CapnPrep said:


> This is what they look like when you mark length: _stāre _and _dăre_.



You are right---sorry. Linguists seem to think that estre in French is from essere, a Vulgar Lation reformulation of esse to make it more like a regular infinitive. TheT arose as a purely phonetic phenomenon when the French reduction of post-stress syllables changed_ essere_ to _essre_ to _estre_.


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## merquiades

CapnPrep said:


> You also included the infinitive in an earlier post, but I don't see how you can go from _stare_ to _estre_. As berndf noted in that thread, _essere _> _estre_ is the straightforward, accepted derivation. Also, have you seen the form _eter_ attested anywhere?



I'm glad you found the other thread.
The evolution of _stare_ would be _stare > estar > ester > eter_.  No I haven't seen _eter_ attested but given the forms _été, était,_ the s would have had to be lost at some part.



> Vulgar Latin. In French, the evolved forms of the two verbs, estre  and ester , merged in the late Middle Ages, as the "s" disappeared from words beginning in est- , as this phenomenon produced Modern French être  and an obscure form * éter , which eventually merged.



Ok, from this link it seems the loss of the s resulted in _etre_ and _eter_, which in turn brought about the merger.  So the epenthetic "t" had long been part of the "esse" infinitive for long before that.


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## fdb

exgerman said:


> Remember that _stare_ and _dare_ are not really 1st conjugation verbs in Latin,



stāre is conjugated exactly like amāre in the present system. dare, on the other hand, has short a in damus, datis, darem, dare etc. Historically, both are athematic verbs (*steH-, *deH- in ablaut with *stH-, *dH-), while most other 1st conjugation verbs are thematic denominatives with suffix *-eH-yo- > *-ā-yo > -ā-. stāre has been completely assimilated to the amāre type, but dare has followed the analogy of amāre in dās, dat, dā only.


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## CapnPrep

merquiades said:


> Ok, from this link it seems the loss of the s resulted in _etre_ and _eter_, which in turn brought about the merger.


The text you quoted is an unsourced statement from an outdated version of the Wikipedia article… The "late Middle Ages" is much too late for the merger (insofar as there has been a merger in French, keeping in mind that _ester_ has probably existed continuously as a distinct verb in legal terminology). In _Alexis_ (11th century) we already find _esteit_ (from _stare_) used as the imperfect of _estre_, apparently interchangeably with the etymological form _er(e)t _(_< erat_):

N'il ne lur dist, ne il nel demanderent, Quels hom *esteit* ne de quel terre il *eret*. ("He didn't tell them, nor did they ask, what man he was nor from what land he was")


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## merquiades

CapnPrep said:


> The text you quoted is an unsourced statement from an outdated version of the Wikipedia article… The "late Middle Ages" is much too late for the merger (insofar as there has been a merger in French, keeping in mind that _ester_ has probably existed continuously as a distinct verb in legal terminology). In _Alexis_ (11th century) we already find _esteit_ (from _stare_) used as the imperfect of _estre_, apparently interchangeably with the etymological form _er(e)t _(_< erat_):
> 
> N'il ne lur dist, ne il nel demanderent, Quels hom *esteit* ne de quel terre il *eret*. ("He didn't tell them, nor did they ask, what man he was nor from what land he was")



I suppose we have to define when the Late Middle Ages are.... I would have considered 11th century late. Interesting in your example that both verbs are present and used with the exact same sense: identification.  Spanish/Portuguese/Italian don't use "stare" with that sense today. The implosive "S" had not been dropped either. 
Yes, I know ester still survives in legal jargon meaning "to appear in court".  But is that enough to consider it alive in its own right? All the common meanings merged.

Edit:  Wikipedia's Phonological history article informs that /s/ was dropped before voiceless consonants between 1250-1350, so the verb confusion must not be linked to the /s/.


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## CapnPrep

merquiades said:


> Yes, I know ester still survives in legal jargon meaning "to appear in court".  But is that enough to consider it alive in its own right? All the common meanings merged.


It was very much alive in Old French, with a full paradigm of forms distinct from _estre_, and the primitive meaning "stand", still available in Old French, did not merge into _estre_. French (like Italian, Spanish, etc.) no longer has a simple verb to express this basic concept. (Maybe this will help get us back on the topic of killerbee256's original question…)


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## francisgranada

Did the Latin _stare _"fully" correspond to the English concept of "to stand"? I think e.g. of _stare _as opposite to _sedere_, or constructions meaning _stand up/out ... _(not in figurative sense) with the verb _stare_.


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## CapnPrep

francisgranada said:


> Did the Latin _stare _"fully" correspond to the English concept of "to stand"?


I'm not exactly sure what you're asking, but _stare_ means "to be standing upright" (as opposed to sitting or lying down) and "to remain standing" (as opposed to walking/moving). The inchoative uses are possible but apparently less frequent, i.e. "to stand up" (from a sitting/lying position), "to come to a standstill".

There are many figurative meanings not necessarily found with English _stand_. For example, based on Lewis & Short:

to remain/linger somewhere 
to serve/fight in the army 
to stand firm/stand one's ground in a fight, persevere 
a battle lasting/continuing 
a ship lying at anchor 
the face/features remaining unmoved/rigid 
a liquid/blood coagulating 
to be thick with/full of [leaves/dust/snow/etc.] 
to stand by someone/take someone's side 
to come to/cost [a price]


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## ThomasK

I understand what M means, I think. We have a similar phenomenon with _schijnen, blijken, _maybe _lijken,_ in Dutch, meaning 'to seem' in English. They seem to refer to light originally... But the figurative (...) meaning seems to have turned up in the thirteenth century already...



merquiades said:


> There is an underlying notion of sitting and standing mixed into the equation of forming "to be" in Romance that I don't quite grasp.



Well, in Dutch we do not use 'to be' very often, we prefer to use a 'position verb': _het glas ligt _(lies), _het huis staat _(stands), _ik zit in de file _(I sit [am stuck] in the traffic jam), ...


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## francisgranada

CapnPrep said:


> ... I'm not exactly sure what you're asking, but _stare_ means "to be standing upright" (as opposed to sitting or lying down) and "to remain standing" (as opposed to walking/moving) ...


Yes, you have understood my question well. My idea was if we cannot find already in Latin the lack (at least partially) of the usage of _stare _as opposed to sitting/lying/walking.


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## berndf

francisgranada said:


> Yes, you have understood my question well. My idea was if we cannot find already in Latin the lack (at least partially) of the usage of _stare _as opposed to sitting or lying.


We can. But you asked more: if there was the meaning _stare=stand up_ and _sedere=sit down_. _Stare_ (=_stand_) can be in opposition to _sedere_ (_=sit_) without either _stand up_ or _sit down_ having to exist. For both verbs, the inchoative meanings are not the primary ones.


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## francisgranada

berndf said:


> But you asked more: ... _Stare_ (=_stand_) can be in opposition to _sedere_ (_=sit_) without either _stand up_ or _sit down_ having to exist.


You are right. I wanted to focus to the fact that the verb _stare _in Romance languages still has the (hidden) meaning of "stand, to be stable" to a certain degree, as opposed to moving. But as opposed to sitting/laying/walking we need to use expressions as _stare in piedi_, _estar en pié_ etc. and for _stand up_ there are other verbs, not connexed to stare: _alzarsi_, _levantarse _etc. That's why my question about the "situation" in Latin.


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## CapnPrep

francisgranada said:


> I wanted to focus to the fact that the verb _stare _in Romance languages still has the (hidden) meaning of "stand, to be stable" to a certain degree, as opposed to moving.


The descendants of _stare_ have a "stative" meaning, but they are not incompatible with movement (_stare in movimento_, _estar moviéndose_, etc.).


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## Outsider

And the strict meaning of "standing on your feet" or "standing up" is mostly lost, at least in the RL I'm familiar with. The English verb "to stand" is actually a tricky to translate into the modern RL; often one must use a (para)phrase.


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