SPANISH VERBS WITH VOWEL GRADATION IN 

 THE PRESENT SYSTEM. 



BY A. H. EDGREN. 



While vowel gradation (especially diphthongization) in the 

 present system of certain verbs is rare in French, where once 

 it was of frequent use, and yet more in Italian and Portuguese, 

 it is very common in Spanish. Indeed, counting both simple 

 and compound verbs, the Castilian yet contains some 400 such 

 verbs, and their mastery is quite a serious task to the beginner 

 of this language. To be sure, the difficulty is insignificant, or 

 rather none at all, where the object of the grammar study is 

 simply to recognize all the verb forms in reading. For it is 

 then reduced to learning the key verbs of three stem-changing 

 conjugational groups, with some few irregularities. But the 

 task is quite different when the object is to distinguish posi- 

 tively, for purposes of composition or otherwise, whether a 

 verb is stem-changing or not, since this implies a distinction 

 between many hundred variable and invariable stems with the 

 the same thematic vowel. 



Purely scientific treatises have determined the leading prin- 

 ciples governing the stem change, but they have hitherto con- 

 sidered the subject too exclusively with reference to verbs 

 subject to vowel gradation and less with reference to verbs 

 with similar formation that have no such gradation. In fact, 

 there exists no exhaustive investigation of the whole field. 

 Moreover, strictly scientific treatises are for the philologist and 

 not for the learner, to whom their results will be of little use 

 until they have leavened the material of the practical gram- 

 mar. Some grammars, indeed, of a scientific cast^ have ap- 

 plied to a certain extent the results gained by historical re-^ 

 search, but with the same one-sidedness, and, it should be 



1 e. g., Forster's Spanische Sprachlehre. 



