Piemonteis: The verbal pronoun

The verbal pronoun is a grammatical particle that does not exist neither in Italian nor in French: it is all made in Piemont. In practice, it explicits the subject of the verb, and it must always be used whenever the verb has a subject (it's not an infinitive, an imperative, or an impersonal form), both when the subject is implicit and when it is explicitly expressed.

In short, you can think of the verbal pronoun as the subject in a conjugation table ("I speak, you speak..."), with the difference that it becomes part of the actual conjugation: thus, to say "I speak" you actually say "I I speak", where the first "I" is the personal pronoun that acts as subject of the verb, and the second "I" is the verbal pronoun which is part of the conjugation of the verb. To say "John reads", you say "John he reads" and so on.

The verbal pronouns are i ("I", "we", "you"-plural), it ("you"-singular, i.e. "thou"), a ("he", "she", "it", "they"). Please note that they are different from personal pronouns ("I" as a personal pronoun, for example, is mi)! Thus, "I speak" is to be translated into mi i parlo, and "John reads" into Gioan a lese.

When the verb also requires a pronoun as a complement and the pronoun is to be located before the verb, that pronoun goes between the verbal pronoun and the actual verb. For euphonic reasons, this ends up creating specialized particles: for example a (third person verbal pronoun, according to the verb) plus ëm ("to me" - that would already become 'm, as seen for articles, after a word ending with vowel) merge into am. Thus, "he speaks to me", "he speaks to you", "he speaks to him" (where "to me" etc., as in Italian, usually go before the verb) become am parla, at parla, a-j parla...

Always in terms of made in Piemont, there is a specific set of pronouns used in interrogations and added after the verb, obviously preceded by its verbal pronoun. Thus, "is it fine?" si traduce con "it is-it fine?", i.e. a valo bin?, where lo is the interrogative pronoun. The other interrogative pronouns are ne ("I", "we", "they"), to ("you"-singular), la ("she") and vo ("you"-plural).