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When used impersonally, haber has a special present-tense form: hay instead of ha. The y is presumed to be a fossilized form of the mediaeval Castilian clitic pronoun y or i, once meaning "there", but now semantically empty, historically cognate with French y, Catalan hi and Italian vi from Latin ibi.
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.
In the Spanish language there are some verbs with irregular past participles. There are also verbs with both regular and irregular participles, in which the irregular form is most used as an adjective , while the regular form tends to appear after haber to form compound perfect tenses.
The verb later transformed to *haveĊ in many Romance languages (but etymologically Spanish haber), resulting in irregular indicative present forms *ai, *as, and *at (all first-, second- and third-person singular), but ho, hai, ha in Italian and -pp-(appo) in Logudorese Sardinian in present tenses.
Before o (in the first person singular of the indicative present tense) and a (that is, in all persons of the present subjunctive), the so-called G-verbs (sometimes "Go-Yo verbs", "Yo-Go" verbs, or simply "Go" verbs) add a medial -g-after l and n (also after s in asir), add -ig-when the root ends in a vowel, or substitute -c-for -g-.
A Spanish verb has nine indicative tenses with more-or-less direct English equivalents: the present tense ('I walk'), the preterite ('I walked'), the imperfect ('I was walking' or 'I used to walk'), the present perfect ('I have walked'), the past perfect —also called the pluperfect— ('I had walked'), the future ('I will walk'), the future ...
Butt and Benjamin provide a number of common combinations of tenses: if the main clause is in the present tense, one has to use the present subjunctive for the dependent clause, but the present perfect subjunctive if the comment made is about a past event – the imperfect subjunctive may be used as well, replacing the latter; if the main ...
Unlike tú, which has many irregular forms, the only voseo verbs that are conjugated irregularly in the indicative present are ser, ir and haber. However, haber is seldom used in the indicative present, since there is a strong tendency to use preterite instead of present perfect.