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(Spanish: "Si yo fuera/fuese rico, compraría una casa.") [66] The perfect past subjunctive (the imperfect subjunctive of haber and then a past participle) refers to an unfulfilled condition in the past, and the other clause would be in the perfect conditional: "Si yo hubiera/hubiese tenido dinero, habría comprado la casa" ("If I had been rich ...
For example: "I hope that it will rain tomorrow" would simply be Espero que llueva mañana (where llueva is the third-person singular present subjunctive of llover, "to rain"). Pluperfect (past perfect) subjunctive. In Spanish, the pluperfect subjunctive tense is used to describe a continuing wish in the past.
The preterite and the perfect are distinguished in a similar way as the equivalent English tenses. Generally, whenever the present perfect ("I have done") is used in English, the perfect is also used in Spanish. In addition, there are cases in which English uses a simple past ("I did") but Spanish requires a perfect.
The progressive aspects (also called "continuous tenses") are formed by using the appropriate tense of estar + present participle (gerundio), and the perfect constructions are formed by using the appropriate tense of haber + past participle (participio). When the past participle is used in this way, it invariably ends with -o.
Unlike the present perfect, the past perfect can readily be used with an adverb specifying a past time frame for the occurrence. For example, it is incorrect to say *I have done it last Friday (the use of last Friday, specifying the past time, would entail the use of the simple past, I did it, rather than the present perfect).
In Spanish, the preterite (pretérito perfecto simple, or pretérito indefinido) is a verb tense that indicates that an action taken once in the past was completed at a specific point in time in the past. (Traditional Spanish terminology calls all past tenses pretéritos, irrespective of whether they express completed or incomplete actions or ...
The pluperfect and future perfect forms combine perfect aspect with past and future tense respectively. This analysis is reflected more explicitly in the terminology commonly used in modern English grammars, which refer to present perfect, past perfect and future perfect (as well as some other constructions such as conditional perfect).
There is a perfect form in both tenses, which is expressed by an inflected form of the imperfective auxiliary verb έχω "have" and an invariant verb form derived from the perfective stem of the main verb. The perfect form is much rarer than in English. The non-past perfect form is a true perfect aspect as in English.