2583: Latin -ere Ending Jan 9, 2022

Rhoticism in Archaic Latin did not describe the mere pronunciation of the consonant of [r] in words as that term would be used in English, but rather the process of transforming [s] and [z] into [r]. This didn't happen in every case (1), but perhaps the most notable is in the '-ere' ending, and its derivative forms -āre, -ēre, and -īre. These were originally *-ezi in Proto-Italic, reconstructed as *-esi in Proto-Indo-European.