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Similarly, the participle agrees with the subject when it is used with ser to form the "true" passive voice (e.g. La carta fue escrita ayer 'The letter was written [got written] yesterday.'), and also when it is used with estar to form a "passive of result", or stative passive (as in La carta ya está escrita 'The letter is already written.').
The Spanish conjunctions y ('and') and o ('or') alter their form in both spoken and written language to e and u respectively when followed by an identical vowel sound. Thus, padre e hijo ('father and son'), Fernando e Isabel ('Ferdinand and Isabella'), sujeto u objeto ('subject or object'), vertical u horizontal ('vertical or horizontal').
Voseo used on a billboard in El Salvador: ¡Pedí aquí tu fría! ("Order your cold one here!"). The tuteo equivalent would have been ¡Pide aquí tu fría! Voseo used on signage inside a shopping mall in Tegucigalpa, Honduras: En City sí encontrás de todo para lucir como te gusta ("At City you find everything to look how you like").
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.
The preterite or preterit (/ ˈ p r ɛ t ər ɪ t / PRET-ər-it; abbreviated PRET or PRT) is a grammatical tense or verb form serving to denote events that took place or were completed in the past; in some languages, such as Spanish, French, and English, it is equivalent to the simple past tense.
The dictionary form always has the vowel, not the diphthong, because, in the infinitive form, the stress is on the ending, not the stem. Exceptionally, the -u- of j u gar (u-ue -gar, -jugar) and the -i- of adqu i rir and inqu i rir (i-ie) also are subject to diphthongization ( juega , etc.; adquiere , etc.).
Conversely, estar is often permanent in Spanish regarding a location, while in Portuguese, it implies being temporary or something within the immediate vicinity (same house, building, etc.) Nuestra oficina queda (or está) muy lejos. (Spanish) [quedar/estar] O nosso escritório é (or fica) muito longe. (Portuguese) [ser/ficar]
The periphrastic preterite may also be used in the subjunctive mood, but this only occurs as a literary tense and sporadically in any case; instead, the simple past subjunctive is normally used. [citation needed] The normative Central Catalan and Valencian forms of anar used to form this tense are outlined in the table below.