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Spanish is a grammatically inflected language, which means that many words are modified ("marked") in small ways, usually at the end, according to their changing functions. Verbs are marked for tense, aspect, mood, person, and number (resulting in up to fifty conjugated forms per verb).
Pluperfect. The pluperfect (shortening of plusquamperfect), usually called past perfect in English, characterizes certain verb forms and grammatical tenses involving an action from an antecedent point in time. Examples in English are: "we had arrived " before the game began; "they had been writing " when the bell rang.
ser, 'to be (in essence)'. This is an Oy-Yo verb. Stem: s-, fu-, er-, se-. There are two ways to say "To be" in Spanish: ser and estar. They both mean "to be", but they are used in different ways. As a rule of thumb, ser is used to describe permanent or almost permanent conditions and estar to describe temporary ones.
Verbs with irregular participles. 1 The roots -scribir, -facer, and -solver appear only in prefixed forms, e.g. inscribir, satisfacer, absolver (although a verb solver was attested). The adjective suelto means 'loose, free'. 2 The variant -scripto is used in Argentina, Paraguay, and Uruguay.
Past active participle: Used with the verb olla (to be) to construct the perfect and the past perfect tenses. In English the verb "to have" is used to form the perfect and past perfect tense (I have / had killed), in Finnish the verb "to be" is used instead (minä olen / olin tappanut).
In the last two examples (perfective and pluperfect), two roots are used in one verb compound. In the perfective tense, the root qop (which is the expected root for the perfective tense) is followed by the root ar, which is the root for the present tense. In the pluperfective tense, again, the root qop is followed by the past tense root qav.
The word perfect in this sense means "completed" (from Latin perfectum, which is the perfect passive participle of the verb perficere "to complete"). In traditional Latin and Ancient Greek grammar, the perfect tense is a particular, conjugated -verb form. Modern analyses view the perfect constructions of these languages as combining elements of ...
Person and number. Spanish verbs are conjugated in three persons, each having a singular and a plural form. In some varieties of Spanish, such as that of the Río de la Plata Region, a special form of the second person is used. Spanish is a pro-drop language, meaning that subject pronouns are often omitted.