A quick question about preterits

Question

Does the preterit agree with the subject or the direct object? I think this is one of my major problems

Answer 1

Do you speak an Indo-Aryan Language (Hindi? Gujarati?) In those languages we conjugate the verb for the direct object in the preterit if the verb is transitive.

For instance "I read a book" in Hindi is "Maine kitaab padi" where "padi" agrees with "kitaab (book)" not "Mai" or "I (I'm a guy)".

Same in Gujarati. "Chhokraae film joi" where "joi" agrees with "film (movie)" not "Chhokraa (boy)".

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In Spanish the verb is conjugated to the subject in the preterit. So "Yo lo hice" = "I did it". "hice" is conjugated to "I" since I'm the doer of the action (or more accurately, the subject).

Note that often pronouns drop (just like in Gujarati and Hindi! :D) when the information is obvious from context. For example:

"Lo hice". We know "hice" is the Yo-form of "hacer" in the preterit so We can infer ti means "Yo lo hice" or "I did it".

Very interesting. I didn´t realize any Indo-European languages did that. Thanks for sharing. - rogspax, Dec 12, 2013

I'm trying to understand where such a preterit came from; essentially the subject takes the postposition "ne" in Hindi or "e" in Gujarati and the verb takes the direct object. - HackerKing, Dec 12, 2013

I only know english, and some spanish and then random words from other languages, like french, korean, german... - actorgirl, Dec 12, 2013

That cleared up a lot of things regarding Hindi that confused me before. Awesome post, HackerKing :) - Helado_eclectico, Jan 25, 2014

Answer 2

You're referring to preterite in verbs right? (There's some other grammatical term that sounds similar to this I think...)

Verbs that conjugate show the subject. Here is a page on the topic: http://www.studyspanish.com/lessons/pret1.htm

Anyways, if you have a sentence like: She ate the taco. (S) (V) (DO) Ella comió el taco.

You use -ió on the verb comer because it is 3rd person. I keep hesitating to say "match" because in Spanish you drop the seperate subject pronoun often, because the verb ending expresses the subject.

i.e. Comió el taco.

¡Buena suerte!