Grammar
Like most Romance languages, Venetian has mostly abandoned the Latin case system, in favor of prepositions and a more rigid subject–verb–object sentence structure. It has thus become more analytic, if not quite as much as English. Venetian also has the Romance articles, both definite (derived from the Latin demonstrative ille) and indefinite (derived from the numeral unus).
Venetian also retained the Latin concepts of gender (masculine and feminine) and number (singular and plural). Unlike the Gallo-Iberian languages, which form plurals by adding -s, Venetian forms plurals in a manner similar to standard Italian. Nouns and adjectives can be modified by suffixes that indicate several qualities such as size, endearment, deprecation, etc. Adjectives (usually postfixed) and articles are inflected to agree with the noun in gender and number, but it is important to mention that the suffix might be deleted because the article is the part that suggests the number. However, Italian is influencing the Venetian Language :
- el gato graso, the fat (male) cat.
- ła gata grasa, the fat (female) cat.
- i gati grasi, the fat (male) cats.
- łe gate grase, the fat (female) cats.
In conservative Venetian, the article alone may convey the gender:
- i gat gras, the fat (all males or males and females) cats.
- łe gat gras, the fat (female) cats.
- el gatòn graso, the fat big (male) cat.
- ła gatòna grasa, the fat big (female) cat.
- un bel gateło, a nice small (male) cat.
- na beła gateła, a nice small (female) cat.
No native Venetic words seem to have survived in present Venetian, but there may be some traces left in the morphology, such as the morpheme -esto/asto/isto for the past participle, which can be found in Venetic inscriptions from about 500 BC:
- Venetian: Mi go fazesto ('I have done')
- Venetian Italian: Mi go fato
- Standard Italian: Io ho fatto
Read more about this topic: Venetian Language
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