Why do conjugations of estar have an accent but other verbs do not?

Question

I am trying to learn the rule for when to use accents for verb conjugations. Estar for example has tu estás and vosotros estáis but dar although it looks similar has no accent (tu das and vosotros dais). What is the rule for the use of accents in verb conjugations? Thanks.

There are no rules. You can find all the conjugations for all verbs above under "Menu". - ian-hill, Dec 19, 2014

That is what is known as ' grammar' one needs to learn it . - ray76, Dec 19, 2014

Please fill out your profile so that we may better help you . Bienvenido al fora , buena suerte amigo. - ray76, Dec 19, 2014

Answer 1

There aren't specific rules to use accents in verbs. The rules are the same for all the words (nouns, verbs, adjectives...). Searching on the net, you'll find a lot of webpages with the rules:

http://www.studyspanish.com/accents/rules.htm

http://spanish.about.com/od/spanishpronunciation/a/stress_accent.htm

In your example, "estás" is a two-syllable word, it ends in a "s", and the stress is on the last syllable. All words like this have an accent mark.

"das" is a monosyllabic word, and one-syllable words in Spanish almost never have an accent mark (only when we need to distinguish between certain words that are spelled identically).

:) - Joydeep_Singh, Dec 19, 2014

Answer 2

Another example is the first person singular of saber which is sé. Again the rule described by Cordobesa applies. The real question then is why is the pronoun se without an accent? And Faldo answered that; to distinguish the two words from one another.

Answer 3

From what I gather the accent on the final vowel in certain of the present tense conjugations of 'estar' is used to indicate that is on this vowel that you place stress in pronunciation, thus 'está' (is) sounds different from 'esta' (this, f) (and there's also 'ésta' (this one, f)). I think 'estar' is unusual in placing stress on the final vowel (in the present tense), whereas in many other verbs it occurs on the penultimate vowel, thus not requiring an accent because penultimate vowel stress is standard default pronunciation for Spanish (unless the word ends in certain consonants, e.g. 'r', hence all infinitives have stressed final '-ar' / '-er' / '-ir').

An accent, or tilde, is usually only used to represent deviation from standard default pronunciation, e.g. 'película' ('pelEEkoolah' as opposed to 'peleekOOlah') OR to distinguish meaning, e.g. 'cómo' (how) and 'como' (like), even though these two spellings are pronounced the same.

Accents are used elsewhere in verbs in other conjugations, e.g. in the preterite and imperfect.

I gather the degree of stress may vary from one Spanish-speaking region to another.