Why is it "yo intiendo" instead of "yo intendo"?
I know English has a LOT of irregular verbs. But usually in Spanish they have a reason. For example spelling "pagué" instead of "pagé" because the latter would change the pronunciation of the hard g.
Is there a reason for the insertion of the 'i' in present tense of intender or is just irregular?
1 Answer
I suspect you mean entender and entiendo.
I am not sure I can attest that these are totally correct, but there is probably some basis to them- it is just how sounds shifted in stressed vs. unstressed position with development of the language. It is not a simple spelling change to maintain the pronunciation as it would be in a regular sense it is a true shift of the vowel sound- a true "irregularity".
d The diphthongization of front and back mid vowels that's referred to here is an historical process moving from Classical Latin to Vulgar Latin to Castilian Spanish, over about a millennium.
This is the way it works: • Classical Latin (ca 0 CE) had long and short vowels. • Vulgar Latin (ca 0-1500 CE) lost the Classical vowel length distinction. • Vulgar Latin innovated a new open/closed distinction for mid vowels e and o. • Mid vowels that were short in Classical Latin became open in Vulgar Latin. • Castilian Spanish (ca 1200 CE) changed Vulgar Latin open e [?] to ie, and open o [?] to ue.
And
The 'governing principle' is stress. In Spanish, [?] and [?] become diphthongs in stressed positions, explaining why niego, niegas, niega, niegan have diphthongs, while negamos does not (the stressed penultimate is [a] there). See the Wiki article on vowel breaking for other examples of diphthongisation in stressed syllables.
https://www.quora.com/Why-are-some-of-the-Spanish-verbs-stem-changing
The vowels E and O "broke", or turned into diphthongs, in stressed open syllables, but stayed the same in unstressed syllables.
For example, Latin focus turned into Spanish fuego, because the -o- was in a stressed open syllable.
Now since verbs were not always stressed on the same syllable, the outcome of the vowel depended on the syllable stress in a given form: this gives the alternation between tener (accent on the final syllable: -e- stays the same) vs. tiene (accent on the first syllable: -e- breaks into -ie-)
