Re: Conditional Tenses in Romance Languages

On Thu, 8 Jul 2004 17:18:21 -0600, Scotto Hlad <scotto@...> wrote:
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> Sender:       Constructed Languages List <CONLANG@...>
> Poster:       Scotto Hlad <scotto@...>
> Subject:      Conditional Tenses in Romance Languages
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> I'm writing a Romance conlang (I presume this is a normal phase for
> conlangers). This stemmed from my love of Romance languges and their parent,
> Latin.
>
> I'm trying to develop the conditional tenses and would like to see how they
> are conjugated in each of them. I have available to me resources to show me
> how the conjugations go in French, Portuguese, but my other resources have
> evaporated in various moves across 2 times zones and one international
> border.
>
> Can some of you kind souls provide me with the conditional forms in
>
> Spanish

In Spanish, it is fairly straightforward:

take the infinitive (any), and add:

-ía - i
-ías - you
-ía - he/she/it
-íamos - we
-íais - you(all)
-ían - they

So for "andar" (walk) you get:

-andaría
-andarías
-andaría
-andaríamos
-andaríais
-andarían

There are some irregulars, such as tener (to have), but most of those
are due to vowel changes (in the case of tener, the e before r was
lost because often certain unstressed vowels get lost in romance
languages). Thus, we get tendr- as the "infinitive" for the
conditional of tener:

-tendría
-tendrías
-tendría
-tendríamos
-tendríais
-tendrían

What's nice is that the infinitives formed from a base infinitive plus
an affix follow the same patterns as the base infinitive: contener =
con + tener (to hold, to contain, to restrain):

-contendría
-contendrías
-contendría
-contendríamos
-contendríais
-contendrían