394 The Loom of Language
Chapter IV (p. 152). This is the peculiar Anglo-American construction
/ should have (French j 'aurais du\ I could have (French faurais pu)
The French often resort to a peculiar construction for must It in-
volves the impersonal verb/a//<w (to be necessary that), e g .
il faut sortir 1
it faut que ie sorte > I must go out
je dois sortu J
When our own equivalent of a Romance infinitive comes after a
preposition, the latter is always to Several prepositions may stand
immediately before the infinitive of a Romance language The two chief
ones are descendants of the Latin de (from or of) and ad (to) Both in
French and in Spanish they survive as de and a or a respectively The
first has become more common, as in the following sentence, which also
illustrates the rule that the pronoun object precedes the infinitive je
sms lien heureux de te loir (I am very happy to see you) Correct choice
of the appropriate preposition depends arbitrarily on the preceding main
verb, noun, or adjective, and we find it with them in a good dictionary
Where we can replace to by m order to, Romance equivalents are pour
(French), para (Span), per (Ital ), e g I am coming jo repair it = je
wens pour le reparer = vengo para repararlo = vengo per npararlo
Italian has a distinctive preposition da derived from the fusion of two
Latin ones (de -j- ad) In different contexts it can mean from, at or for
When the infinitive has a passive meaning we can usually translate to
by DA, e g •—
Egh ha un cavallo da vendere
he has a horse to sell (= to be sold)
Questa e una regola da imparare a memoria
this is a rule to learn by heart (= to be learned by heart)
In all Romance, as in Teutonic, languages the infinitive form of the
verb (see Chapter IV, p 139) is the one which replaces our "ing form
when the latter is a verb-noun, e g voir^ c*est croire (seeing is believing)
The Portuguese infinitive has peculiar agglutinative possessive forms
equivalent, e g to your seeing (VERes), our doing (FAZERmos), their
asking (PREGUNTARem), with the endings -e$ (your), -mos (our),
-em (their) The following example illustrates this construction;
passei sem me verem = I passed without their seeing me.
MOOD
Up till now nearly all our illustrations of Romance verb behaviour