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Castilian Spanish Verbs:
The i-verbs

So far we have seen two kinds of verbs, a-verbs and a-verbs. The a-verbs generally have the vowel a after their root: cant-a-r, cant-a-ndo, cant-a-do. The e-verbs have e in the same places, except that in two forms, the e changes to ie or i: beb-e-r, beb-ie-ndo, beb-i-do. When e changes to ie or i like this, it happens in the accented syllable of the e-verb.

There is another group of verbs, such as partir, which look exactly like e-verbs except for these things:

1. In every form in which the stem vowel is accented, it becomes i or ie.

2. This changes the infinitive from -er to -ir. The future and the conditional are both built on this infinitive in -ir.

The only form in ie is the active participle (part-ie-ndo), as in the normal e-verbs. The forms in i are the infintive (part-i-r), imperative plural (part-i-d), perfect/passive participle (part-i-do), present 1 plural (part-i-mos) and present 2 plural. This last has part-�-s where we would expect part-�-is by comparison with the normal e-verbs (beb-�-is).

Where the stem vowel is unaccented, it has e like the normal e-verbs: part-e-s, part-e-, part-e-n.

Here is the whole verb, with the vowels which differ from normal e-verbs underlined.

Tense/mood1 singular2 singular3 singular 1 plural2 plural3 plural
Presentpartopartesparte partimospart�sparten
Imperfectpart�apart�aspart�a part�amospart�aispart�an
Preteritepart�partisteparti� partimospartisteispartieron
Futurepartir�partir�spartir� partiremospartir�ispartir�n
Subjunctivepartapartasparta partamospart�ispartan
Conditionalpartir�apartir�aspartir�a partir�amospartir�aispartir�an

Infintive:partir
Imperative Singular:parte
Imperative Plural:partid
Active Participle:partiendo
Perfect/Passive Participle:partido

One way to think of these is the verbs is to say that they have the stem vowel i, but that it changes to e or ie in some forms. This doesn't really make sense. It's a normal part of Spanish that e changes to ie in accented syllables. To me it makes more sense to say that the base form of these verbs has the stem vowel e, such as part-e-, and that this e changes to i in more forms in these verbs than in normal e-verbs.

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