Romance Copula - French

French

Modern French has only one copula. Old French, however, had estre ( → essere → *essre → estre) and ester ( → *estare → estar → ester). The latter meant to ‘stand’, ‘stay’ or ‘stop’, and might have been used as a copula in a similar way to other Romance languages. With phonetic evolution, the forms of each verb tended to be confused with one another, with the result that estre finally absorbed ester; around the same time, most words beginning with est- changed to ét- or êt-. The modern form of the verb is être.

The only clear trace of ester (or éter if we bear in mind the loss of the s) in the modern copula is the past participle: instead of the *étu one would expect, we find été – just what we would expect from ester/éter. The same tendency to use past participles derived from (the supine of ) to replace the past participles of the main copula is also seen in Italian and Catalan.

The present participle and all imperfect forms of être are regular and correspond to what one would expect for a verb with the stem êt-; however, they could also be considered as deriving from éter since the forms coincide.

All other forms of être are from rather than .

Ester also survives in the infinitive in the set phrases ester en justice and ester en jugement, which translate the Latin term STARE IN IVDICIO meaning "to appear in court", "to stand before the court". Ester en justice has come to mean, "to file a lawsuit", i.e. to appear in court as the active party.

Être