Venetian grammar


A peculiarity of Venetian grammar is a "semi-analytical" verbal flexion, with a compulsory "clitic subject pronoun" before the verb in many sentences, "echoing" the subject as an ending or a weak pronoun. As will be clear from the examples below, Venetian subject clitics are neither "redundant" nor "pleonastic" because they provide specific information, not present on verbal endings. Independent/emphatic pronouns, on the contrary, are optional.
The clitic subject pronoun is used with the 2nd and 3rd person singular, and with the 3rd person plural. This feature may have arisen as a compensation for the fact that the 2nd- and 3rd-person inflections for most verbs, which are still distinct in Italian and many other Romance languages, are identical in Venetian.
The function of clitics is particularly visible in long sentences, which do not always have clear intonational breaks to easily tell apart vocative and imperative in sharp commands from exclamations with "shouted indicative". In Venetian the clitic el marks the indicative verb and its masculine subject, otherwise there is an imperative preceded by a vocative:
Indeed, the verbal forms requiring subject clitics can often change or even drop their endings without problems of confusion because the clitic itself provide the necessary information. Because Venetian subject clitics mark number and gender, they convey specific information that is not present on the endings. Thus, they act like a bridge that provide number and gender agreement between verb and subject. Thus, although some traditional grammars consider subject clitics as "redundant" or "pleonastic" elements, Venetian subject clitics are neither redundant nor pleonastic.
The clitics are the same in whole Veneto with two exceptions: te becomes ti in Venice and becomes tu in some bellunese areas. El becomes Al in bellunese.

2nd singular person present indicative of "magnar"

Such variations in last and internal vowels do not block reciprocal comprehension between people in Veneto because what is felt as important to mark the verb is the clitic.
Also general Venetian forms exist with no endings:
Note that when the subject is postverbal the clitic is banned and the past participle of compound forms is invariably masc.singular, yielding a semi-impersonal form which does not exist in Italian:

Normal form

In Italian the past participle is always inflected while in the Venetian in the impersonal form it is invariable and the verb has no plural clitic, differently from the normal flection.