# Present Indicative "V" verbs in Romance Languages



## SerinusCanaria3075

I have a brief but hard to explain question. It's obvious that many forms of Latin verbs were introduced into multiple verbs (like _SVM_ in the Spanish verbs _Ir_ and _Ser_) but how does one explain where the "v" verbs (that's what I'll call them for now) came from?:

Ir (Spanish): *voy*, *vas*, *va*, *vamos*, *vais*, *van*
Ir (Portuguese) *vou*, *vais*, *vai,* *vamos*/_imos_, _ides_, *vão* (_imos,ides_ – similar to _ī́mus, ī́tis_ in Latin _eo_ [_ire_] )
Andare (Italian): *vado*/vo, *vai*, *va*, andiamo, andate, *vanno*
Aller (French): *vais*, *vas*, *va*, allons, allez, *vont*
A voi (Romanian): Voiesc/*voi*, Voiești/*vei*, Voiește/*va*, Voim/*vom*, Voiți/*veți*, Voiesc/*Vor*

All except Romanian are used as "to go", where in Romanian is used as the auxiliary in the periphrastic future (_voi face, vei face, va face_) meaning _to want_.

Does anybody have a clue of where these "*V*" forms where borrowed from (what verb in Latin)?


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## Outsider

They're from _VADO_, "to go".


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## SerinusCanaria3075

That was quick and simple. I didn't know _vado_ was a synonym of _eo_.
So Portuguese borrowed from both verbs correct? Is the 1st person plural form _imos_ simply a variant in Portuguese or are both _vamos/imos_ prefered equally?


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## Outsider

SerinusCanaria3075 said:


> That was quick and simple. I didn't know _vado_ was a synonym of _eo_.


To be honest, I didn't check the verb's meaning in Latin. This is just my recollection, it may have meant something different than _EO_, originally.



SerinusCanaria3075 said:


> So Portuguese borrowed from both verbs correct?


That's right, and a little bit from _SVM_ too, as you mentioned earlier. 



SerinusCanaria3075 said:


> Is the 1st person plural form _imos_ simply a variant in Portuguese or are both _vamos/imos_ prefered equally?


_Imos_ is not normally used nowadays, although it used to be common in ancient Portuguese. It may be still employed in a few dialects. The 2nd. person plural did retain the old form in the present tense:

eu vou
tu vais
ele vai
nós vamos
vós *ides*
eles vão

But then again in Portuguese the 2nd. per. plur. is old-fashioned, anyway.


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## SerinusCanaria3075

I see. So _vamos_ is the "prefered" one to use in Spanish/Portuguese.
As I looked at the Latin conjugations of _vado_ I noticed that only the _present indicative and conjunctive_ forms were kept in most modern languages so it seems to me like all the rest were discarded or simply forgotten (that's my opinion, I may be wrong).


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## Outsider

And the 2nd. per. sing. imperative, _vay/vai_.
Looking at the conjugation table, I can't help noticing that _vado_ was a very irregular verb, and most of what was lost were irregular forms (along with the passive voice).


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## SerinusCanaria3075

Yes, some major cleanup was done. I forgot about the imperative as another "memory"



Outsider said:


> And the 2nd. per. sing. imperative, _*vay*/vai_.


I see _vai _in Portuguese/Italian but I'm not sure where _vay_ comes from.
In Spanish it's _ve_ and _vaya_.


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## Outsider

Oh, I misspelled _ve_, then.  

P.S. Now I remember that there was a thread about _imos_ in the Portuguese forum not too long ago.


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## modus.irrealis

Outsider said:


> And the 2nd. per. sing. imperative, _vay/vai_.
> Looking at the conjugation table, I can't help noticing that _vado_ was a very irregular verb, and most of what was lost were irregular forms (along with the passive voice).


Do you mean irregular in Latin? It doesn't seem to be irregular -- well, I guess it depends on what "irregular" means with Latin, since the stem for the perfect forms of _vado_ is unpredictable from its infinitive but that's true for most verbs whose infinitive doesn't end in _-are_. About passive forms, my dictionary doesn't mention any so I don't think it had any -- or more precisely, it doesn't give a stem for the passive participle so at least there were no perfect passive forms.


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## OldAvatar

In Romanian, the verb _a voi_ is actually an archaic form. The most used verb for to want is _a vrea_. Dictionaries say that they have the same Latin root, _volere_.


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## Outsider

modus.irrealis said:


> Do you mean irregular in Latin? It doesn't seem to be irregular -- well, I guess it depends on what "irregular" means with Latin, since the stem for the perfect forms of _vado_ is unpredictable from its infinitive but that's true for most verbs whose infinitive doesn't end in _-are_.


I assumed that the forms in red, in the Verbix table, were irregular.. 



modus.irrealis said:


> About passive forms, my dictionary doesn't mention any so I don't think it had any -- or more precisely, it doesn't give a stem for the passive participle so at least there were no perfect passive forms.


Then what are _vador, vaderis, vaditur_, etc.?


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## jazyk

> Then what are _vador, vaderis, vaditur_, etc.?


Vador is possible if you mean the verb vador, vadari (to summon). Vaderis doesn't make sense to me (tu és ido?/¿tú eres ido? ). Vaditur is possible with a non specified subject (vaditur - vai-se/se va). 

Do not confuse vado, vadere (to go, to walk) with vado, vadare (to wade). 

There's nothing irregular about vado, vadere, by the way.


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## SerinusCanaria3075

OldAvatar said:


> In Romanian, the verb _a voi_ is actually an archaic form. The most used verb for to want is _a vrea_.


Yes, I notced also that the DEX dicitonary gives _vroi_ as a possible variation to _vrea_ (if I'm not mistaken) but as I understand the forms _vroiam, vroiai_, etc. are incorrect in Romanian, a common "mistake" as I recall.



> Dictionaries say that they have the same Latin root, _volere_.


There's two things that confuse me about this:
1. _Volere _is modern Italian for "to want", but strangely I can't find any Latin forms that look like Vol*e*re (with 2 *e*'s) other than _volo_, in which case has the infinitive _velle/volare _(strangely in Latin it meant _to wish_, _to want_, and also _to fly_ like in Spanish _volar_)
2. Did Romanian _voi_ actually get or borrow forms from this verb (volo) or instead did the auxiliary forms for the _Viitor_ come from _Vado_?

(vādō, vādis, vādit, vā́dimus, vā́ditis, vādunt / voi, vei, va, vom, veți, vor)


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## jazyk

> 1. _Volere _is modern Italian for "to want", but strangely I can't find any Latin forms that look like Vol*e*re (with 2 *e*'s) other than _volo_, in which case has the infinitive _velle/volare _(strangely in Latin it meant _to wish_, _to want_, and also _to fly_ like in Spanish _volar_)



Volere (It), vouloir (Fr), querer (Pt/Sp), a vrea (Ro), voler (Cat) - Latin volo, vis, volui, velle (this last form is the infinitive)
Volare (It), voler (Fr), volar (Sp/Cat), voar (Pt) - Latin volo, volas, volavi, volare. (this last form is the infinitive)


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## Cnaeius

SerinusCanaria3075 said:


> Yes, I notced also that the DEX dicitonary gives _vroi_ as a possible variation to _vrea_ (if I'm not mistaken) but as I understand the forms _vroiam, vroiai_, etc. are incorrect in Romanian, a common &quot;mistake&quot; as I recall.
> 
> 
> There's two things that confuse me about this:
> 1. _Volere _is modern Italian for &quot;to want&quot;, but strangely I can't find any Latin forms that look like Vol*e*re (with 2 *e*'s) other than _volo_, in which case has the infinitive _velle/volare _(strangely in Latin it meant _to wish_, _to want_, and also _to fly_ like in Spanish _volar_)
> 2. Did Romanian _voi_ actually get or borrow forms from this verb (volo) or instead did the auxiliary forms for the _Viitor_ come from _Vado_?
> 
> (vādō, vādis, vādit, vā́dimus, vā́ditis, vādunt / voi, vei, va, vom, veți, vor)



 Volere is a late latin form for velle.


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## modus.irrealis

Outsider said:


> I assumed that the forms in red, in the Verbix table, were irregular..


Hmm... it's unclear to me what Verbix means with its various colours -- I tried some other verbs and there are forms in blue and grey, so I'm not sure. But at the very least, only the 1st person singular of the perfect is irregular and every other form of the perfect is then completely regular, but then again, that form is listed as one of the principal parts of a verb. What I learned was that an irregular verb was one whose forms are not predictable even when you know all four principal parts -- if it were just based on the 1st person singular of the present, then virtually all verbs would be irregular because even for the present you need to know the present infinitive in order to conjugate it correctly, so I'm guessing that's why that definition of irregular is used for Latin.

About the passives, I checked a more comprehensive dictionary and it too makes no mention of them, so I'm guessing Verbix uses some kind of algorithm that generates the passive forms for all verbs and ignores the meaning, and I agree with jazyk that only the impersonal passives like _vaditur_ make sense. But interestingly, even the perfect form _vasi_ is put in parentheses and I'm not sure what that means but at the least, I guess it's not commonly attested in classical Latin.


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## modus.irrealis

SerinusCanaria3075 said:


> 2. Did Romanian _voi_ actually get or borrow forms from this verb (volo) or instead did the auxiliary forms for the _Viitor_ come from _Vado_?


Just from _volo_, as OldAvatar said. In fact, one of the features shared by many of the Balkan languages is that the future is formed with auxiliary element that was/is a form of the verb "to want."


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## CatalinaSuperstar

SerinusCanaria3075 said:


> A voi (Romanian): Voiesc/*voi*, Voiești/*vei*, Voiește/*va*, Voim/*vom*, Voiți/*veți*, Voiesc/*Vor*
> 
> All except Romanian are used as "to go", where in Romanian is used as the auxiliary in the periphrastic future (_voi face, vei face, va face_) meaning _to want_.


 
In Catalan they use something similar in the periphrastic preterite (compare with pres. ind. of Anar, to go):

Vaig (vaig)
Vas (vas)
Va (va)
Vam (anem)
Veu (aneu)
Van (van)            + infinitive


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