Conjugation patterns

Question

I promised in one of my previous posts to uncover some conjugation patterns of Spanish verbs, so here are some of them:

verbs that end in -poner follow the same conjugation pattern as the verb poner.

verbs that end in -tener follow the same conjugation pattern as the verb tener.

verbs that end in -venir follow the same conjugation pattern as the verb venir.

verbs that end in -volver follow the same conjugation pattern as the verb volver.

verbs that end in -cer and -cir have irregular yo form in present tense that ends in -zco.

What do you think? Do you know any other conjugation patterns'

Answer 1

I made a program that generates all conjugated forms just from the infinitive, and they are not as complex as people think. There are only a small handful of totally irregular verbs, and a fair amount of verbs following a small amount of patterns.

Phonetic changes, like c/qu, c/z, g/j are systematic, and there are other changes that people are unaware of, like an unstressed i between vowels, or at the beginning of a word and followed by another vowel, always turn into a Y; any i following an ñ or an ll, followed by another vowel, makes the i disappear; any irregular change forcing the appearance of an i, following another i, forces these two i to fuse into a single one.

Answer 2

Leaving aside the compound verbs (as Lazarus says, in general, they always follow the conjugation of the base verb), it depends a little bit on what you mean by "pattern":
- there are some fairly general spelling rules which some people call "irregularities", but which actually apply fairly systematically across all Spanish verbs (e.g. if 'c'/'qu' represents [k] in the infinitive, then it will always change appropriately to represent that sound depending on the ending);
- there are one or two "irregularities" which are more or less predictable provided you're careful to narrow down the criteria properly: as you mention, verbs ending in -Vcer (where V is a vowel) generally pattern like "parecer", but you need to be careful to at least narrow it down to verbs of 3-syllables or more, excluding prefixes (so "recocer" patterns like "cocer", not like "conocer"); similarly, -Vcir verbs pattern like "producir" (N.B. they differ from -Vcer verbs in "unaccented" preterites: "produje" etc vs "parecí" etc)-- again, be careful of exceptions such as "lucir".
- then, there are a few pattens-- mainly changes in the stem vowel depending on the position of the accent-- that various verbs could "select" to follow, but which aren't completely predictable from the infinitive. For example, a verb whose last vowel of the stem is "o" could change that to "ue" when stressed ("oler" -> "hUEle"); "e" could change to "ie" ("calentar" -> "calIEnta"). In these cases, if a word related to the verb has the vowel change when stressed. then so will the verb (e.g. "caliente" has "IE", so "calentar" will have the vowel change; the adjective "manifiesto" will predict the chane in "manifestar", but but be careful of "manifEstación", where the "e" isn't stressed)
- these various patterns can combine (for example, a spelling rule that words beginning with "ue" have "h" added gives "huele" vs "oler" (and with a prefix, be careful of "desosar" -> "desHueso"); "cocer" has "cuezo", combining the vowel change plus a spelling rule that predicts 'z' for [s] before 'o'). These COMBINATIONS making the system appear more complex than it really is-- there aren't actually so many individual patterns when you break it down.

Answer 3

:

verbs that end in -cer and -cir have irregular yo form in present tense that ends in -zco.

Careful: this "pattern" (as you call it) only works 90% of the time: vencer and mecer, for example, don't follow it (they are actually regular). The others, rather than patterns, are verbs constructed by adding prefixes, and therefore, they have identical conjugation.,

I know all the patterns in Spanish, but they are far too many to post them here.

Recently I posted a list about strong preterites, and coincidentally, some of the patterns you seek:

[url=http://my.spanishdict.com/forum/topic/show'id=1710195:Topic:898748&page=1&commentId=1710195:Comment:902815&x=1#1710195Comment902815]http://my.spanishdict.com/forum/topic/show'id=1710195:Topic:898748&...[/url]