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Re: Conditional Tenses in Romance Languages

From:Roger Mills <rfmilly@...>
Date:Saturday, July 10, 2004, 3:30
Actually it was Barry Garcia who answered you, but I'm up on Spanish too :-)

The future and conditional in Span. (and French and I'm pretty sure Port.)
is based on _infinitive + haber_. The pres. indic. forms of Span. haber, as
you probably know, are he, has, ha, hemos, habéis, han, so the future (all
reg. verbs) is: infinitive + -é, -ás, -á, -emos, -éis, -án. The conditional
doesn't use identifiable imperf. forms of haber (había, habías etc.), just
the _imperfect_ endings, which gives infinitive
+ -ía, -ías, -ía, -íamos, -íais, -ían

Italian like the others uses the present forms of avere for the future, but
oddly, the preterit forms for the conditional. I think that's unique in the
Romance world.

IIRC Romanian forms its future with the verb for 'to want'; I'm don't know
whether it has a conditional tense.
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> that for the info on the Spanish conditional. Are these endings the > imperfect tense or the preterite tense? > Thanks > Scotto >

Replies

Scotto Hlad <scotto@...>
Ray Brown <ray.brown@...>