Did You Know This Secret About the Spanish Future Tense?
The future tense in Spanish (I will ___) is formed by adding certain endings to the infinitive of a given verb:
So, “cantar” means “to sing”, but “cantaré” means “I will sing”
This got it start in Latin, where a sense of necessity could be expressed through the addition of the verb “Habēre” meaning “To have” plus the infinitive of a given verb:
Cantāre habēre (to have to sing)
Cantāre habeō (I have to sing)
Eventually, “I need to sing” evolved into “I will sing”.
This happened in much the same way as the English phrase “I’m going to sing”, which morphed from “I’m currently on my way to sing” to “I will sing in the future”.
So, as Spanish evolved from Latin, the phrase basically changed from:
“Cantāre habeō” (I have to sing), to
“Cantar he” (I will sing)
and finally “Cantaré” (I’ll sing)
The same thing happened with the Spanish conditional mood/tense, which evolved from the imperfect form of “Habēre”:
So, something like:
“I would be having to like something to eat if you had it.” became, “I’d like something to eat if you have it.”
(Me gustaría algo de comer si lo tuvieras.)
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