Catalan

Conjugate Verbs

Facts

More information:

    Introduction

    Catalan Language, language that originated in Catalonia, a region in northeastern Spain. Catalan is spoken, in Spain, in the provinces of Gerona, Lérida, Barcelona, Tarragona, Castellón, Valencia, Alicante, and the Balearic Islands; in France, in nearly the whole of the Pyrénées-Orientales; and in parts of Cuba and Argentina.

    The Catalan language is a Romance language. Ranged in the group of Hispanic languages, Catalan has a character as distinctive as that of Castilian, Portuguese, and Galician. Among the characteristics of Catalan are the following: A number of perfect participles are formed from the perfect stem instead of from the infinitive stem; the pronunciation of b and v has not merged; the voiced sound of intervocalic s has persisted; in unaccented final vowels, a is retained and other vowels are dropped; the Latin au is changed to o as in Castilian; final dentals are vocalized, which is held to be the essential characteristic of classic Catalan; noun declensions are totally absent; and the original pronunciation of the Latin u is retained in cases in which French and Provençal use ü.

    The Verb

    The Catalan verb system has grammatical categories similar to those of neighbouring Romance languages such as Spanish, Occitan, French, and Italian. The formal similarities with Occitan are most noticeable.

    One feature of Catalan is the periphrastic preterite tense for referring to the remote past, which is constructed with characteristic present-tense forms of the verb anar (to go) and the infinitive of a verb (vaig parlar, vas/vares parlar, va parlar, vam/vàrem parlar, vau/vàreu parlar, van/varen parlar).

    Verblists

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