Tag: Verb

How to Use the Spanish Verb Conjugation Book?

There’s an “Easter Egg” in Verbix 9 for Windows.

An Easter Egg in software is a hidden feature that is not documented. In Verbix 9 the hidden feature creates a Spanish Verb Conjugation book and saves it as PDF. This article describes how to use the book. As a matter of fact, this book is used exactly in the same way as any verb conjugation book that you can buy in a bookstore!

1. First look up the verb from the verb index.

As in many verb conjugation books, the Spanish Verb Conjugation book created in Verbix for Windows 9.0 has an index of verbs.

Let’s find for example ‘ser’ (English ‘to be’).

 

2. Check the verb model that the verb refers to.

In the index the verb ‘ser’ is marked with number 1. This number refers to the verb conjugation table 1. Now that we browse the book to verb conjugation table 1, we find the verb ser conjugated in all tenses.

As in Verbix, irregular forms are displayed in red and regular forms are in black.

About the Spanish Verb Conjugation Book

The book has an index of 38,395 verbs.

The book comprises 231 pages.

Color coding clearly shows additional information of every verb form:

  • regular forms in black
  • irregular forms in red
  • forms that have changes in spelling due to orthographic rules are in blue
  • archaic forms are in purple
  • non-used (hypothetical) forms are in grey

The book is free!

 

Korean or Arabic

The Korean and Arabic languages were added about in the same time on the Verbix website. Both languages support conjugating verbs since a few months back.

It has been interesting to follow how many verbs have been conjugated since then. Today (9/21/2011) Arabic verbs have been conjugated 59,241 times and Korean verbs 58,226 times.

In the all-time ranking these languages now have the 44th and 45th place in the number of verbs having been conjugated. The most conjugated language is Spanish with verbs having been conjugated 76,986,823 times!

Links to go:

 

The Swedish verb promota

The Swedish language keeps incorporating words from other languages, such as English for example.

Therefore it’s no surprise that the Swedish adopted the verb promota ‘to promote’, too. The new ‘Swedish’ verb appeared in the beginning of 1990’s. Like other new verbs in the Swedish language, this verb is fully regular.

The work promote originally comes from the Latin language from two separate words pro ‘forward’ and movere ‘to move’. And based on this Latin background, we find the Swedish verb promovera ‘to promote’

Links to visit:

 

Verbix 9

Will there be a newer Verbix version? Yes, there will.

This is the first time I mention about the upcoming Verbix 9.

The aim in this new version is to make Verbix for Windows even easier to use than the previous versions. That said, I dare to attach the first screenshot of Verbix 9 verb conjugator here.

Screenshot of Verbix 9, the verb cpnjugator
Verbix 9 verb conjugator

The upcoming Verbix 9 will have two tabs:

  1. Languages and
  2. Conjugation

The languages are now represented in a list. There will be an efficient filter that makes it easy to keep just a handful of languages in the list. Or the user can also have the complete list of 200+ languages there.

For each language Verbix 9 also shows additional language related information on additional 4 tabs as seen in the screenshot. Because many of the languages are developed and maintained by others, there is copyright and contact information for each language in Verbix.

Feel free to send us feedback and wishes for the upcoming Verbix 9 verb conjugator.

Reverse Verb Conjugation

Verb conjugation is the process of forming all the verbal forms from the dictionary lookup word. (generally infinitive). Reverse conjugation means getting the infinitive from any conjugated verb form.

In linguistics revers conjugation would rather be named morphological analysis. In morphological analysis the different parts of  word are analyzed: the stem and the modifiers. The modifiers are those parts of a verb that denote mood, tense, number, person, etc.

In Verbix the reverse conjugation (or morphological analysis) is made simple. The user simply enters any verb form, and Verbix tells if it’s a verb or not. If it’s a verb, then Verbix returns the infinitives that can be conjugated.

More info:

Don’t Panic!

The English language has a limited number of irregular verbs. Once you learn them, it’s pretty straight-forward to conjugate all English verbs.

There are, however, a number of verbs that are regular but undergo orthographical changes. Orthographical changes are there to ensure that the pronunciation is preserved in the different forms of a verb.

’To panic’ is one of these verbs. An automated verb conjugator might conjugate the verb in past ’paniced’, but that’s wrong. The correct past is ’panicked’, so there is a ’k’ attached to the stem to preserve the pronunciation.

The dictionary of Verbix knows a half dozen of verbs that are conjugated like panic. And the past forms are marked in blue to denote the orthographic change.

In addition the built-in rules of Verbix also know orthographic rules. So, don’t panic! Verbix knows how to conjugate verbs ending in ’c’.

Links to go:

Verb Conjugation

Verb conjugation is the central part of the sentence in most languages.

Verb conjugation is the creation of derived forms of a verb from its principal parts by inflection. Principal parts is sometimes the infinitive like “cantar” in Spanish, but it can also be verb theme like “skriva – skriver – skrev -skrivit” in Swedish.

In Spanish it’s enough to know the infinitive of a verb to get all the conjugated forms; in the case of regular verbs all the conjugated forms are formed with the same set of endings. Unfortunately there is a big amount of irregular verbs that don’t follow the regular verb conjugation patters.

As shown in the example above, in Swedish verb conjugation there’s a verb theme consisting of four verb forms. All Swedish verb forms are formed by applying the same set of endings to the theme. The theme itself must be memorized, because it contains information about irregularities, if any.

Read more:

Verb Conjugator Gadget

I’ve been involved in development of a Windows gadget in my job.

Click to install the Verb Conjugator gadgetGadgets are those small applets that Windows Vista and Windows 7 users can install on their desktop.

Typically gadgets simplify a specific task. So I decided to simplify verb conjugation and wrote a Verb Conjugator gadget.

The first version of the gadget is ready and available for download.

Links:

Portuguese Verb Conjugation

After the spring in Spain in 1995, I attended classes in Portuguese. I felt that Portuguese shouldn’t be too hard to learn, because it’s closely related to Spanish. I was wrong. Portuguese is much harder than Spanish – and in this I mean the pronunciation. As people say that written and spoken French are different languages, this could also apply to Portuguese. 

I learnt the Portuguese as spoken In Portugal and I would say it’s harder to learn than French.

The verbs in Portuguese, however, are pretty close to the Spanish ones. The infinitives are pretty much identical with the corresponding verbs in Spanish. There are some differences, though:

  • Second person plural is not used (in Portugal)
  • Compound tenses are not used
  • “Synthetic pluperfect”, i.e., pluperfect is formed without auxiliary (like in Spanish and English)
  • Conjugated infinitive

Somehow I felt that Portuguese preserves more verbal forms than any other Romance language – Romance languages are those that derived from Latin. The conjugated or inflected infinitive is something specific for Portuguese only.

I attended elementary Portuguese classes in one year only. But after that, guess what? I bought myself the first Portuguese verb conjugation book to master the Portuguese verbs.

Links:

Spanish Verb Conjugation

Since living a half year in Spain in 1995 I’ve been interested in verbs and verb conjugation. The reason is that the Spanish language has quite a lot of irregular verbs that the student just needs to learn, in order to properly communicate. 

I learnt quite quickly the most used Spanish verbs that are all irregular; ser ’to be’, estar ’to be’, ir ’to go’, tener ’to have’, haber ’to have’, poner ’to put’, etc.

But the more I learnt the more new irregular verbs. So I bought my first verb conjugation book ”Al arte de conjugar verbos en español”. This book simply contains 100+ sample verbs, each representing a group of irregular verbs.  In the end of this book there’s an index with 12,000 verbs that refer to a sample verb.

This kind of verb conjugation book helps the student to find the correct conjugation for any verb. I say any verb, because a verb not being in the book is typically a new verb ‘neologism’ and these tend to be conjugated regularly.

Bookstores seem to have even 10s of verb conjugation books alone for the Spanish language. I assume this is due to Spanish being a popular language to study.

So did I learn to speak Spanish by read a verb conjugation book? No I learnt it when hitch-hiking around the Iberian Peninsula in spring 1995. But in the written Spanish the book served me for a long time as the ultimate help.

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