● L'angelo del Signore portò l'annuncio a Maria, #twitterangelus #it
— Mark Dobson (@MarkTSoaPM) Gennaio 8, 2013
ed ella concepì per opera dello Spirito Santo. #twitterangelus #it
— Mark Dobson (@MarkTSoaPM) Gennaio 8, 2013
A (hasty) recording of the Angelus in Italian.
These two lines feature some regular verbs. I illustrated regular verbs here, and you should read this about the polite form.
Here's a recap using verbs from the Angelus instead:
| -are | -ere | -ire | |
|---|---|---|---|
| portare | infondere | concepire | |
| bring, take | infuse, instil | conceive | bringing, infusing, conceiving |
| present indicative | |||
| porto | infondo | concepisco | I bring, infuse, conceive |
| porti | infondi | concepisci | you bring, infuse, conceive |
| porta | infonde | concepisce | he/she/it brings, infuses, conceives (you bring etc.) |
| portiamo | infondiamo | concepiamo | we bring, infuse, conceive |
| portate | infondete | concepite | you (plural) bring, infuse, conceive |
| portano | infondono | concepiscono | they bring, infuse, conceive |
| passato remoto (remote past, simple past) | |||
| portò | infuse | concepì | he brought, infused, conceived |
In fact, not all these verbs are perfectly regular, but they are regular in the present indicative – that will do for us.
I’ve put the regular endings in bold. In fact, there are two regular forms for -ire verbs. Last time I put the version which was more similar to the -are and -ire forms, to make it simpler, but in fact, these endings are more common.
Now, I'm going through the Angelus in order, so I'm touching on a few things in an order that you wouldn't usually adopt in learning. The Padre Nostro doesn't use any kind of past tense. The Angelus, on the other hand uses a form of the past tense that you're unlikely to cover in a beginners' course. Shouldn't I just gloss over it then? Well, no, I don't think so. Not just because it's in the Angelus either. It's used extensively in written Italian: if you read any Italian, you're pretty much bound to find it. So it pays to recognise it when you see it.
But instead of hitting you with a complete verb conjugation, I've just added the third person at the bottom, since that's the form you're most likely to encounter (and the only form in the Angelus too). In -are and -ire you can see that they both end with an accented vowel, which should help you to spot it. This is only slightly confused by the fact that the future can end with an accented vowel too: but in that case there would be an r first (e.g. porterò, porterai, porterà).
I already said that infondere wasn't perfectly regular, so it has its own peculiar form as you can see. The really important one to remember in any case is -are, -ò since this conjugation accounts for the majority of Italian verbs. The regular endings (for some reason there are two) for -ere verbs would be -ette and -é, though many -ere verbs are irregular anyway.
