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The verbs haber and tener are easily distinguished, but they may pose a problem for learners of Spanish who speak other Romance languages (where the cognates of haber and tener are used differently), for English speakers (where "have" is used as a verb and as an auxiliary), and others.
An auxiliary verb (abbreviated aux) is a verb that adds functional or grammatical meaning to the clause in which it occurs, so as to express tense, aspect, modality, voice, emphasis, etc. Auxiliary verbs usually accompany an infinitive verb or a participle, which respectively provide the main semantic content of the clause. [1]
The Spanish copulas are ser and estar.The latter developed as follows: stare → *estare → estar. The copula ser developed from two Latin verbs. Thus its inflectional paradigm is a combination: most of it derives from svm (to be) but the present subjunctive appears to come from sedeo (to sit) via the Old Spanish verb seer.
The differences among Romance languages occur at all levels, including the sound systems, the orthography, the nominal, verbal, and adjectival inflections, the auxiliary verbs and the semantics of verbal tenses, the function words, the rules for subordinate clauses, and, especially, in their vocabularies.
For other irregular verbs and their common patterns, see the article on Spanish irregular verbs. The tables include only the "simple" tenses (that is, those formed with a single word), and not the "compound" tenses (those formed with an auxiliary verb plus a non-finite form of the main verb), such as the progressive, perfect, and passive voice.
In some verbs the process went further and produced irregular forms—cf. Spanish haré (instead of *haceré, 'I'll do') and tendré (not *teneré, 'I'll have'; the loss of e followed by epenthesis of d is especially common)—and even regular forms (in Italian, the change of the a in the stem cantare to e in canterò has affected the whole ...
The table at the right shows the main verb forms, with examples for -ar, -er and -ir verbs (based on parlar 'to speak', vider 'to see', and audir 'to hear'). The simple past, future, and conditional tenses correspond to semantically identical compound tenses (composed of auxiliary verbs plus infinitives or past participles).
In Spanish, clitic pronouns normally come before the verb, except with the imperative, the infinitive, and the gerund. In verbal periphrases, they precede the auxiliary verb. In spoken Brazilian Portuguese, clitic pronouns normally come before the main verb. In verbal periphrases, they come between the auxiliary verb and the main verb.