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A copula is a word that links the subject of a sentence with a predicate (a subject complement). Whereas English has one main copula verb (and some languages like Russian mostly express the copula implicitly) some Romance languages have more complex forms. Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, and some other Romance languages have more than one copula ...
Similarly, the participle agrees with the subject when it is used with ser to form the "true" passive voice (e.g. La carta fue escrita ayer 'The letter was written [got written] yesterday.'), and also when it is used with estar to form a "passive of result", or stative passive (as in La carta ya está escrita 'The letter is already written.').
The dictionary form always has the vowel, not the diphthong, because, in the infinitive form, the stress is on the ending, not the stem. Exceptionally, the -u- of j u gar (u-ue -gar, -jugar) and the -i- of adqu i rir and inqu i rir (i-ie) also are subject to diphthongization ( juega , etc.; adquiere , etc.).
Spanish is a grammatically inflected language, which means that many words are modified ("marked") in small ways, usually at the end, according to their changing functions. Verbs are marked for tense, aspect, mood, person, and number (resulting in up to fifty conjugated forms per verb). Nouns follow a two-gender system and are marked for number.
Estar generally focuses on the condition of the subject, and specifically on qualities that include: Physical condition; Feelings, emotions, and states of mind; Appearance; In English, the sentence "The boy is boring" uses a different adjective than "The boy is bored". In Spanish, the difference is made by the choice of ser or estar.
Note that the Vulgar Latin reconstructions are believed to have regularized word stress within each tense (except the present and imperative). Word-final e probably converged on /ə/. Many verb forms have undergone elisions, like the indicative pluperfect cantāveram > *cantára and the subjunctive imperfect cantāvissem > *cantásse.
Spanish personal pronouns have distinct forms according to whether they stand for the subject or object, and third-person pronouns make an additional distinction for direct object or indirect object , and for reflexivity as well. Several pronouns also have special forms used after prepositions.
The 5000 words in Davies' list are lemmas. [5] A lemma is the form of the word as it would appear in a dictionary. [6] Singular nouns and plurals, for example, are treated as the same word, as are infinitives and verb conjugations. The table below includes the top 100 words from Davies' list of 5000.