estar → ester). The latter meant to ‘stand’, ‘stay’ or ‘stop’, and might have been used as a copula in a similar way to other Romance languages. With phonetic evolution, the forms of each verb tended to be confused with one another, with the result that estre finally absorbed ester; around the same time, most words beginning with est- changed to ét- or êt-. The modern form of the verb is être. The only clear traces of ester (or éter if we bear in mind the loss of the s) in the modern copula are the past participle and the imperfect. Instead of the *étu one would expect, we find été – just what we would expect from ester/éter. The same tendency to use past participles derived from (the supine of ) to replace the past participles of the main copula is also seen in Italian and Catalan. The Old French imperfect was iere (from Latin ); this was replaced in Middle French by the imperfect of ester, which was estois (from Vulgar Latin *estaba, Latin ). The present participle and all imperfect forms of être are regular and correspond to what one would expect for a verb with the stem êt-; however, they could also be considered as deriving from éter since the forms coincide. All other forms of être are from rather than .Ester also survives in the infinitive in the set phrases ester en justice and , which translate the Latin term meaning "to appear in court", "to stand before the court". Ester en justice has come to mean, "to act in a lawsuit", i.e. to appear in court as a party. This is a highly defective verb and mostly exists in the infinitive, although present and past participle are infrequently used as well. Être † Literary. Romansh Romansh has just one copula, esser. Star means, "to reside". Esser RomanianA fi, fire is the copula in Romanian. These infinitive forms evolved from the passive verb , "to become", "to be made": → fiere → fire → *fir → fi (fire) In Latin was used suppletively as the passive voice of "to do", "to make". However, in the Vulgar Latin dialects spoken in modern-day Romania, its evolved form fiere replaced essere, maybe due to the similarity between the stems fi- of and fu- of (which is not coincidental, as both stems descend from the Proto-Indo-European verb *bʰuH-). Other