Topic:
When a verb stem ends with either a hard g or soft g sound, a spelling change is needed in the Yo form.
Verbs whose stem ends with a "g" sound
The Spanish "g" has both a hard pronunciation (gusto
) and a soft one (gente
).
(When "g" is followed by "e" or "i", it takes the soft pronunciation like the letter "h" in English.)
This has an impact on a few verb conjugations.
Infinitives ending with -ger or -gir
When a verb infinitive ends with -ger or -gir, the final "g" has a soft pronunciation, as in proteger
, which means to protect.
If we followed the normal rules of conjugating an -er verb, the Yo form would be protego with a hard "g" sound instead.
The Spanish language likes to maintain the pronunciation of the stem, so we will replace the "g" with a "j", which makes the same sound as the soft "g".
The Yo form becomes protejo
.
It's All About the Spelling
If you think about it, this is really just a spelling change. If your brain is focused on turning proteger into protejo, you don't even need to know that the "g" becomes a "j".
Of course, for writing and for our exercises, you will need to notice the change.
Here is the whole conjugation:
Present Tense Conjugation of proteger
Irregular Times 2
Some verbs are irregular in more than one way.
For example, elegir
is an e => i stem-changing verb, and it also also changes "g" to "j" in the Yo to maintain the soft "g" sound.
Elegir means to choose or to elect.
Present Tense Conjugation of elegir
The Hard "g" in Verbs that end in -guir
A similar spelling change occurs in infinitives that end with -guir.
Consider distinguir
, which means to distinguish.
In the infinitive form, the letter "u" only exists to make the "g" a hard pronunciation and the "u" is not pronounced.
When we conjugate distinguir in the Yo form, the final -o already makes the "g" sound hard, so the extra "u" is unnecessary. In fact, if we were to leave the "u" intact, it would add a "u" sound that was not present in the infinitive at all.
So, we drop the extraneous "u" in the first person conjugation and get distingo.
Present Tense Conjugation of distinguir
In the exercises for this lesson, we will have only these -ger, -gir and -guir verbs for practice.
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On to the Exercises and the Quiz
To practice the verb forms in this lesson, click Practice Exercises below.
Whenever you want, you can take the quiz for this lesson.
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