Maximum number of unique verb forms in Big Romance Languages
Number of unique verb forms
In the previous post we had a look at which of the Big Romance Languages has the highest number of grammatical tenses. This time we will have a look at another metric — number of unique verb forms.
Definition
The formal definition of number of unique verb forms is:
If for a given language X:
There exists a verb which can be conjugated into N different in writing forms
And
There is no other verb in the language X that can be conjugated into more than N different in writing forms
Then the number of unique verb forms of language X is N
Example
Number of unique verb forms for English is 8 because for the verb to be there is 8 different in writing forms and no other English verb scores higher:
be, being, am, are, is, was, were, been
English is rich if compared to languages like Chinese or Vietnamese (for which number of unique verb forms = 1). Nevertheless, we are yet to see how much more abundant Big Romance Languages can be.
