Talk:Spanish verbs

message: Beware the list has moved to a page on its own (List of Spanish verbs). Make your additions there. I moved the list because the main article was becoming really unwieldy. I've also moved the conjugation paradigm to Spanish verb paradigm. I'm thinking of moving the section on vowel-alternating verbs elsewhere, too. Wikipedia guidelines say an article should be no more than 32 KB and this is about 36 KB. --Pablo D. Flores 22:38, 23 Apr 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: List of simple verbs

message: If anyone has any questions about Spanish verbs, put them here and I shall answer them in the article.   Chamaeleon 02:19, 12 Jan 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Requests 

message: This article is lacking of the near future (I'm going to go), which is prefered in South America over the Simple Future ("Esta noche voy a ir a bailar"/"Esta noche iré a bailar"). 
Perhaps it woud be also good to add a short comment on the preferences of use of the pasado simple (South America) and the pretérito perfecto ("Ayer fuí a bailar"/ "Ayer he ido a bailar").
Finally, the pretérito anterior continuo ("hubiera (hubiese) estado hablando") seams to me that exists, yet I haven't been able to find an example that couldn't be expressed in another splimpler form.
-Mariano July 8, 2005 10:42 (UTC)
*Note: List of Spanish verbs has been moved to Wikitonary under the name list of all spanish verbs K-unit 15:38, July 22, 2005 (UTC)
::Referring to the periphrastic future (ir a/going to), a recent edit interchanged "Spanish" with "English" in "This form is much more common in Spanish than in English."  I wasn't aware that either language significantly outdid the other in use of the periphrastic future.  Can anyone cite a source in support of either claim?  By the way, "South America" includes Brazil and excludes Mexico and Central America—is that really what you want to say? Kotabatubara (talk) 15:54, 1 February 2015 (UTC)
replies: text:  Don't be so nice to IP editors. The quickest fix is to delete the sentence, which probably never was anything but a personal observation. --Jotamar (talk) 18:19, 2 February 2015 (UTC)
thread_title:  Near Future 

message: I believe the term "perfective" has been used incorrectly to describe the tenses/aspects formed with haber. See Grammatical_aspect#Confusing_terminology:_perfective_vs._perfect.
"Perfective" refers to actions viewed as a simple whole, as opposed to actions viewed as a process (imperfective) and actions with a resulting later state or condition (perfect). Hence, the only necessarily "perfective" tense in spanish is the simple preterite (pretérito indefinido).
Unless i am completely misguided, the term "Perfective" as it currently appears on the page should be replaced with "Perfect," to correctly describe the Spanish  perfecto.
:I think you're right. I've seen the term "perfective" used to discuss more exotic languages, but only ever "perfect" in relation to Spanish. — Hippietrail 01:38, 1 November 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Perfective vs. Perfect 

message: I'm looking through the main page, as well as the discussion page. The Discussion seems to have gone quiet about a year ago, and the main page has regular small updates. I'm thinking to make some changes to the main page, mostly as a vehicle for me to learn. I am not an expert in linguistics (or Spanish, for that matter).
The list at the top of the Discussion page is great; it seems to have a list of topics that still need attention (I say "seems" because I haven't checked the list versus the main page yet).
The biggest problems with the page, from my reading, is its inconsistency with similar pages (such as French verbs, English verbs, and so on); and its inconsistency with supporting pages (such as Grammatical mood, Grammatical tense, and so forth). Wouldn't it be great if the link to tense used the same definition as the words on this page ...?
Because of my lack of subject-matter knowledge, I'm hoping the community can help me improve the page. I'm not sure how the page will end up looking, but I am sure that I'll learn a lot.
DanielVonEhren 00:21, 12 July 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Status of page 

message: Hi, as a native Spanish speaker, I'm afraid I can't agree with some of the contents of the article. Before making any correction, I would like to discuss here what I find to be mistakes.
As far as I know, there is no personalized, adjective form for every verb. It may sound convenient and can look similar to English, but nouns derived from verbs such as andante (from andar, walk), comedor (from comer, eat), hablador (from hablar, speak) do not mean, respectively walker, eater or speaker. I don't think it's a recognized form of any verb.
On the other hand, at least in Spain's Spanish language textbooks, we where taught a non-finite forms that is missing in the article: the compound gerund (e.g. habiendo hablado, having talked).
Another mistake is considering Conditional a mood. There are just three moods: Indicative, Subjunctive and Imperative. The conditional tense is part of the indicative.
I find a general trend in the article to assimilate Spanish verb conjugation to English verb conjugation. I personally think it's OK, as long as you don't introduce errors in order to avoid a long explanation. We can end up with a very clear but perfectly mistaken article.
For instance, in Spanish "continuous tenses" as such do not exist. It is true that you can use the auxiliary verb "estar" to form "continuous" tenses. You can also use "ir a" to form a future in exactly the same way you use "going to" in English. In Spanish this is called a "Perífrasis verbal" and there are lots of them, just as in English (for example: "used to do something" to indicate a habit). The thing is that they don't are "canonical" tenses.
I'll try to find a link to a complete and exact table of the verb tenses defined in Spanish to avoid misunderstandings. For the time being, allow me to list the tenses as taught in Spain: 
-Indicative mood: Simple forms: Presente, pretérito imperfecto, pretérito indefinido, condicional simple, futuro simple. Compound forms: Pretérito perfecto, pretérito pluscuamperfecto, pretérito anterior, condicional compuesto, futuro compuesto.
-Subjunctive mood: Simple forms: Presente, pretérito imperfecto, futuro simple. Compound forms: Pretérito perfecto, pretérito pluscuamperfecto, futuro perfecto.
-Imperative mood: Presente.
By the way, it seems that there is a confusion between perfect tenses and compound tenses. In Spanish, they are called perfect because the action indicated by them is finished. The pretérito indefinido is also called pretérito perfecto simple, because it is a perfect, simple tense, and right now it is listed as non-perfect. So I would rename what the article refers as perfect tenses to compound tenses since they are conjugated by the composition of haber and the corresponding participle.
Sorry for the long exposition. --78.24.136.36 (talk) 09:04, 10 December 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Thank you for your suggestions. Over time, a lot of your recommendations appear to have been integrated into the article, for example, merging the conditional mood into the tenses section. I cleaned up that section some more yesterday and I think it's in pretty good shape right now. I also went ahead and removed the part about a personalized adjective form for every verb, as that seems to be WP:OR. And finally, I made it clear in the periphrasis section that those forms exist but are not canonical. If you're still around, I'd be happy to hear more of your suggestions and work with you further on improving this article. Sincerely, – Novem Lingvae (talk) 11:20, 17 February 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  Personalized, adjective form and other (IMHO) mistakes 

message: I would like to make some comments or suggestions for correcting this article. First of all, according to the modern Spanish grammar, condicional simple and condicional compuesto are not a mood, but two tenses in the "indicative mood". There is no such mood as "conditional" in Spanish. Secondly, there are no "continuous tenses" the way it is now in the article. The verb estar and the gerund is just a periphrasis or circumlocution (of many other) that expresses continuity, but they are not verbal tenses and never were. My suggestion is consulting a conjugation of a verb from DRAE online and using the terms and categories as they are there. Regards, --TheMexican (talk) 13:44, 21 December 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Condicional is not a mood, and there are no continuous tenses oficially as in English 

message: Can someone confirm the form hesties?  I learned this as vosotros habéis.  Foros2000 (talk) 10:17, 22 January 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: I also learned it as vosotros habéis. I have never seen hesties in any of my textbooks, and to be honest, it doesn't even look Spanish. I'll take a quick look in the article right now and make appropriate changes. – Novem Lingvae (talk) 11:09, 17 February 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  Vosotros habéis / hesties =

message: Based on scans of the Davies corpus at <www.corpusdelespanol.org>, I have revised the lists of time expressions that were said to "indicate" (better: "tend to co-occur with") either the preterit or the imperfect tense. Most of the expressions were well-matched with one of the two tenses, but — based on the corpus scans — I have moved "por un rato" from the imperfect list to the preterit list because, like "por un día", "por un año", etc., it specifies a measured length of time, which is likely to focus attention on the beginning and ending of the action or state. (In the corpus there are only 7 tokens of "por un rato" adjacent before or after a preterit or imperfect, but 6 of these involve the preterit.) Other expressions I've moved to the preterit column because of their correlation in the corpus are "durante" (following the verb — 94%), "varias veces" (91%) "nunca" (73%) and "tantas veces" and "muchas veces", both  weakly favoring the preterit at 62% and 61% respectively.  
I have deleted "en ese momento", "siempre", and "mucho" from both lists as being too weakly correlated with their indicated verb tense (51%, 56%, and 58% respectively). "En ese momento" does focus on a moment, but that moment can just as well be within the duration of the action or state (imperfect) as at its beginning or end (preterit).  I've deleted "de momento" ("for the time being, for now") as too rarely used with past tenses to be useful here.
I've added 6 expressions to the preterit list: "hoy" (80%), "luego" (83%), "[number] veces" (78%), "tan pronto como" (78%), "después que" (87%), and "desde que" (77%).  To the imperfect list, I've added "todavía" (85%) and "ya" (67% with imperfect, even without counting the "había" etc. of the pluperfect).Kotabatubara (talk) 05:54, 8 February 2011 (UTC)
thread_title: Time expressions with preterit or imperfect

message: I'm reverting many of the 19 June 2011 revisions by 79.154.193.209 because they replaced idiomatic English with stilted or ungrammatical forms.
* "Comprender" is usually translated "understand".  English "comprehend" doesn't reflect the ordinary conversational register of Spanish "comprender".
* Contractions such as "I'm" for "I am", etc. are the normal way that English is spoken.  In speech, the uncontracted forms are used only in sermons and other formal orations, or for emphasis.  They are not a faithful translation of the Spanish examples (which are in the conversational register). Run Google searches on "I'm travelling" and "I am travelling" to see which one is more numerous.
* The title "Mr." (Mr. Ruiz) is rarely spelled out as "Mister".  Compare "Mr. Smith" (17.3 million Google hits) and "Mister Smith" (232,000).
* People named Eduardo are called Eduardo in English nowadays, not Edward.  Names are rarely translated.
* "Entró" and "came in" are good conversational equivalents; "entered" is of a higher register, and more rarely used.  Google searches support this.
* Spanish "tranquilo" is conversational; English "calm" is conversational; English "tranquil" is stilted, bookish language, not a good equivalent for "tranquilo".	
* "That'll be Fabio" -- this contracted form is much more likely than "That will be..." when it acts as the "future of probablility".
* "Latin America" includes countries where Spanish is not much spoken, e.g. Brazil.  "Spanish America" is a more frequent expression than "Hispanic America".
* "It rained much" is of doubtful grammaticality.  "Much" is normally used only in "non-assertive" sentences (negatives and interrogatives).  "It rained a lot" is the grammatical, normal way to say "Ha llovido mucho".  You can also say "It rained a great deal", but not "It rained much".
* "Let's eat!" is the only way to say "¡Comamos!" in English.  The uncontracted form "Let us eat" is likely to be heard as a request for permission.
* "Commoner" is a noun (a person not of the nobility). Make "common" comparative with "more".  A Google search bears this out.
* There is no such word as "ereyesterday".  And "ere" is archaic.  "Yesternight" is also archaic.
* "Thrice" is virtually archaic.
* "I bathed": 319,000 Google hits.  "I had a bath": 1.08 million.  "I took a bath": 2.03 million.
* "I want that the doors be closed" is not grammatical English.
Kotabatubara (talk) 05:31, 20 June 2011 (UTC)
thread_title: Idiomatic English

message: The table headed "Negative imperative (imperativo negativo)" shows the conjugational ending for vos without final s's: -e, -a, and -a for ar, er, and ir verbs respectively.  
The table headed "Negative command forms of the verb comer" shows the conjugational ending for vos with two options for this er verb, both with a final s: "¡No comas!" or "¡No comás!"
I think the second table is probably correct.  Could someone please make the appropriate corrections?  Thanks.  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 71.101.37.37 (talk) 23:34, 5 May 2012 (UTC)
thread_title:  Tables on "vos" negative imperative are contradictory 

message: Will this information be added in the future? Jarble (talk) 18:19, 27 January 2013 (UTC)
replies: text: The term "principal parts" is much used in the tradition of English grammar, to help learners keep track of irregular verbs like "go"/"went"/"gone" (as opposed to regular ones like "help"/"helped"/"helped"). For English it is a practical concept, because the forms that change are seen as whole words. But in Spanish the forms that change are the "stems" of verbs (which are bound to "endings"). So the information you are looking for is in the article, but it is called by other terms, such as "stem-changing". Kotabatubara (talk) 20:12, 27 January 2013 (UTC)
replies: text: I'm deleting the note at the top of the article that says "This article is missing information about principal parts of Spanish verbs" etc. "Principle parts" are not part of the Spanish grammatical tradition. See the article "Principal parts", where it says "In Spanish, verbs are traditionally held to have only one principal part, the infinitive, by which one can classify the verb into one of three conjugation paradigms (according to the ending of the infinitive, which may be -ar, -er or -ir)." Kotabatubara (talk) 21:04, 16 September 2013 (UTC)
thread_title: There is no information about Spanish principal parts here

message: "Esta mañana comí huevos y pan tostado" doesn't sound good to me (a Spanish speaker from Spain). 
I would say:
"Esta mañana he comido huevos y pan tostado"
and:
"Ayer comí huevos y pan tostado"
--84.123.71.253 (talk) 12:01, 5 February 2013 (UTC)
replies: text: The sentence is OK for Latin America and the Canary Islands. Jotamar (talk) 18:57, 5 February 2013 (UTC)
thread_title:  comí / he comido 

message: There is nothing here about how Spanish inflects it's verbs with voice. I, not being a Spanish learner or speaker, have no idea how it works. The current section just describes a very general definition for Voice, not how spanish inflects its verbs with Active or Passive Voice. Frozenfire71 (talk) 23:33, 6 January 2017 (UTC)
replies: text: Spanish verbs don't inflect for voice, they just use an auxiliary verb for the passive voice, as explained in the page, section The Passive. If there is something not clear enough in that section, please let us know. --Jotamar (talk) 15:03, 7 January 2017 (UTC)
thread_title:  Spanish voice information missing? 

message: "Used because the general norm in the voseo imperative is to drop the final -d and add an accent; however, if this were done, the form would be í"
What is this intended to mean? It reads like a tangle of conflations (infinitive-fixation where it doesn't apply, i.e. suppletion; prosody and orthography "add an accent"...) and maybe -- it's difficult to decipher -- invoking teleology where there is none (because... if this were done...). Can someone help to sort this out? Barefoot through the chollas (talk) 20:40, 25 December 2019 (UTC)
thread_title:  imperative of 'go' for vos 

message: I am thankful for the efforts of all those who have layed out extensive information about Spanish verbs on Wikipedia: it helps me get a better understanding and more knowledge of this language.
Having said that, in the current version of the article one finds:
* [A] 7 categories listed in the introduction (1. tense, 2. number, 3. person, 4. T-V distinction, 5. mood, 6. aspect, 7. voice);
* [B] 6 sections listed in the contents (1. person and number, 2. mood, 3. tense, 4. impersonal or non-finite forms of the verb, 5. voice, 6. verbal aspect);
* [C] 5 accidents of the verb announced;
* [D] 6 sections following this announcement (1. person and number [first person; second person; singular forms; plural forms; third person; singular forms; plural forms] , 2. mood, 3. tense, 4. impersonal or non-finite forms of the verb [infinitive; gerund; past participle] , 5. voice, 6. verbal aspect).
Category is not defined here, but - from the lists and titles and announcement - it appears to be somehow related to accident of the verb. Their numbers, however, vary from 7, to 6, to 5, and back to 6 again. Their names too are not always the same, raising the question in the mind of a novice - I can imagine - whether or not the same things are meant. Furthermore, the five sections concerning what may be gleaned - from the terms used in the categories list [A] and the number of accidents announced [C] - to be veritable categories, are interrupted by a section on something that seems to be different than a category, namely impersonal or non-finite verb forms. And, strangely, T-V mood does not get its own section, though it seems to be very similar to an accident of the verb. Or am I wrong here?
Questions:
* [Q1] Are accidents of the verb also categories? [I suppose yes.]
* [Q2] Is T-V distinction also an accident of the verb (apart from being a category)? [I suppose yes.]
* [Q3] Is there support for having a one-to-one correspondence between the categories (those related to verbs; not other categories like adverbs for instance), the accidents of the verbs, the sections about them, and the order in which they appear in the list in the introduction and the order of the corresponding sections?
I am convinced the article would be more readable, particularly to a novice, if its structure would be more along the lines suggested in [Q3].Redav (talk) 22:11, 15 September 2020 (UTC)
replies: text: I guess that the use of terminology such as accident, category, trait, etc., is entirely theory-dependent, and different grammarians will use different words and concepts. So, if you think that the current wording of the page can be improved so that the average reader will understand it better, go ahead and do it. --Jotamar (talk) 21:44, 22 September 2020 (UTC)
thread_title:  Categories, sections, accidents, and counting: structuring of the contents and the form of the article 

message: , this claim needs at least one respectable source, preferably more: "In older classifications there was a fourth mood, the conditional, that included the two conditional tenses (simple and compound), but nowadays those tenses are included in the indicative mood." Even once that's done, though, it still clashes with the Wikipedia article Conditional mood, which begins "The conditional mood (abbreviated cond) is a grammatical mood...", and continues thus for Romance: "While Latin used the indicative and subjunctive in conditional sentences, most of the Romance languages developed a conditional paradigm". Barefoot through the chollas (talk) 20:37, 24 June 2021 (UTC)
replies: text: I've added a ref (Di Tullio & Malcuori 2012). There's no contradiction in having a page about the conditional mood and stating that in Spanish it's now considered a part of the indicative. Grammar models come and go. --Jotamar (talk) 22:09, 24 June 2021 (UTC)

text: In the page you mention, Conditional mood, check the 3rd paragraph in the lead: Some languages have verb forms called "conditional" although their use is not exclusive to conditional expression. Examples are the English or French conditionals... It's obvious that the Spanish and French conditionals are very similar. --Jotamar (talk) 22:18, 24 June 2021 (UTC)
thread_title:  Conditionals as indicative 

message: The page mentions that these two different endings exist (-ra and -se), but doesn't clearly state if there is any difference in meaning.
Are these semantically equivalent?  Or is there any shift in nuance if you use one instead of the other?  And how / why did these two forms both come to exist? ‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │Tala við mig 19:33, 2 January 2024 (UTC)
replies: text: Selected obvious-by-title items in the bibliography here should help to answer your questions:  https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/language-variation-and-change/article/abs/dialectal-variation-in-mood-choice-in-spanish-journalistic-prose/A5078F72953A55482772B40D32295FED Barefoot through the chollas (talk) 17:13, 3 January 2024 (UTC)
replies: text: @Barefoot through the chollas — Sadly, I don't have access, and I don't particularly want to pay $26 for the paper.  If you've already read that, could you provide a summary, with regard to -ra vs. -se forms? ‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │Tala við mig 19:35, 4 January 2024 (UTC)
replies: text: Although the article itself is of interest, I was referring to items in the article's bibliography. Any good library should be able to provide you access to the paper and to most of the items cited. Barefoot through the chollas (talk) 22:21, 4 January 2024 (UTC)

text: The main difference is that in many countries the -se form has virtually disappeared from the conversational language and is now typical of literary registers. --Jotamar (talk) 22:14, 3 January 2024 (UTC)
replies: text: @Jotamar, thank you.  So presumably -se forms would only appear in formal writing, and come across as stuffy / stiff / archaic?  Perhaps even hyper-polite?  Are there any other differences in meaning compared to the -ra forms? ‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │Tala við mig 19:36, 4 January 2024 (UTC)
replies: text:  "... would ... come across as stuffy / stiff / archaic?" Probably, I don't live in one of those countries, so I can't be sure. "Are there any other differences ...?" Some works about the correct language mention a few specific uses where only the -ra form is possible, however even for those cases I have heard the -se forms. --Jotamar (talk) 18:39, 6 January 2024 (UTC)
thread_title:  Subjunctive ''-ra'' vs. ''-se'' forms – any difference in nuance?