conjugation of iar verbs
Why do some iar verbs have an accent in their conjugation and some don't: confiar, confío; enviar, envío; resfrirse, resfrío; variar, varío y esquier, esquío have an accent over the i in the present tense but verbs such as limpiarse, familiar, estudiar, copiar do not.
Gracias, Humberto
2 Answers
I'll bet it has to do with the origin of the word. Some verbs need to maintain stress on the i, so you have to add an accent, others don't. Just a theory though...good question.
Think of words as music. We have fabricated consonants and vowels to create auditory notes which become a compilation of music. Each language is its own music. Our ears (which are auditory receptors) hear the music, and from it create pictures. It is not necessary for our minds to spell out every word in the sentence. That would be too tedious. Yet, it’s our ability to construct a written language which parrots the spoken one… which adds cohesion and restraint to it. Without rules to govern and protect a language…we would have decay. In Spanish the musical tone is a crecendo. After reaching the crecendo, the rest of the words falls off. An accent mark in Spanish tells you that you have reached the crecendo of that particular spoken word. Envío, resfrío, varío are written words…parroting the spoken language, whose crecendo can be found where the accent mark is specified. After reaching their crecendo the rest of the word trails off. Words such as enviar, resfriar, and variar have a different crecendo. Whenever a word ends in an l, d, z, r, and, does not have an assigned stress (accent) mark anywhere else within the word, the crecendo falls on the last syllable in the word. The last syllable in each verb is its crecendo. This means that each of these verbs end in an up pitch. Remember, an accent mark does not mean that you pronounce the stressed vowel any louder. It just means that that is where the crecendo of that particular word is. This becomes a written word which parrots the spoken language.
Viejito
