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Why are there two ways of the conjugation of some verbs? For example "provvedere" shown in the dictionary. Is the red one more commonly used?

Charo
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smartsheep
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    The red colour seems to me to indicate that the conjugation form is irregular. – Charo Aug 31 '20 at 05:43
  • It's just that some tenses of some specific Italian verbs admit two different forms (an example). For the specific case of "provvisto" and "provveduto", they usually have different usages. I would recommend to check this kind of things on a dictionary. – Charo Aug 31 '20 at 08:48
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    That said, your question is not completely clear to me. What exactly are you expecting to see in an answer? – Charo Aug 31 '20 at 08:55
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    About what I heard from my teacher in middle school, verbs with multiple conjugation in past participle have the one that ends with one vocal + to that is the older version while the other is newer. Probably, the oldest one will disappear in the future use – xKobalt Aug 31 '20 at 09:15
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    The verb provvedere is a composite of pro and vedere. The conjugation of vedere has the same peculiarities. However veggo, veggono and vidente are antiquated and no longer common; veduto and visto alternate. On the other hand provvisto is commonly used only as an adjective and the past tenses are formed with provveduto. – egreg Aug 31 '20 at 14:12
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    @Charo - I think the OP is asking “why” a verb, in this case provvedere, has two different forms, for instance, in the past participle. It is an interesting question which is not easy to answer. – Hachi Aug 31 '20 at 18:09
  • So, it's a question about etymology, @Hachi? Or they are simply trying to understand the contents of the source of the image in the question? – Charo Aug 31 '20 at 18:11
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    Well, the question clearly asks “why” so I guess it is an etymological issue. – Hachi Aug 31 '20 at 18:13
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    It may be that way, @Hachi, but it's not completely clear to me: this is the reason of my previous comment. – Charo Aug 31 '20 at 18:15
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    As egreg correctly notes some of those forms are no longer common (like provveggo for instance), but the question still remains. – Hachi Aug 31 '20 at 18:21
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    Thank you, everyone! Sorry for not expressing my question clearly. I got curious about etymology things when I was looking it up in the dictionary. I was wondering if there might be some explanations about that. Is there a kind of verbs more likely to have two forms of participles? Perhaps, I'm just guessing, the older version may follow some regulations of pronunciation and the newer version is more and more commonly used simply because it's easier to remember the regular ones? – smartsheep Sep 01 '20 at 01:14
  • @smartsheep What diccionary is your screenshot from? I like it and I'd like to use it, too :) – Honza Zidek Sep 01 '20 at 13:24
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    In Spanish it often happened that some words were adopted from Latin historically twice. The word changed differently upon each "import". Eg. key: LAT - clavis, SPA - llave (for unlocking door), clave (password). Could this also be the case in Italian, that the verb in some of its form was kind of "double-imported" from Latin and distorted differently upon each import? – Honza Zidek Sep 01 '20 at 13:36
  • Thank you very much, Honza. It's Eudic. Unfortunately, there's only the Chinese version of the dictionary I guess. (So sorry for the mistake about your name last time!) – smartsheep Sep 03 '20 at 20:17

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