Spelling Change Verbs

Verbos con cambio ortográfico

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I don’t know of an official name for them, but I refer to certain Spanish verbs as "spelling change verbs" because they require a small spelling change in certain conjugations. For the most part, these verbs are conjugated just like regular verbs, other than a little problem in some conjugations that must be corrected for reasons of pronunciation. It’s easy enough to do, once you understand why and how.

 Note that spelling change verbs are not the same thing as stem-changing verbs, though some verbs belong to both categories.

As you probably know, Spanish spelling is very similar to Spanish pronunciation – once you’ve learned the rules, you can pronounce a brand-new Spanish word with little or no difficulty. That sounds easy, but in fact there is a potential difficulty that stems from this: when conjugating certain verbs, spelling changes are required in order to maintain the correct sounds.

Spanish vowels are divided into two categories, hard and soft, because certain consonants are pronounced differently depending on whether they are followed by a hard or soft vowel.

When conjugating Spanish verbs, the sound of the last letter in the stem (e.g., the C in sacar, the G in pagar) always needs to sound the same in every tense and mood. If the infinitive has a hard G, as in pagar, every conjugation of pagar needs to maintain that hard G sound. But what happens in a conjugation where the stem is followed by the soft vowel E, such as the first person singular pretérito? To maintain the hard pronunciation, there needs to be a spelling change.

There are two main types of spelling change verbs: verbs that need a hard sound in front of a soft vowel and verbs that need a soft sound in front of a hard vowel.

1) Changing a soft sound to a hard sound

Pagar has a hard G sound, which is maintained in all of the present tense conjugations because all of the endings begin with hard vowels (pago, pagas, etc). However in the pretérito, the first person singular ends in the soft vowel E, which would normally give you pagé and would be pronounced [pa hay]. What you want is [pa gay], so to get that sound you need to add a U: pagué.

There are three consonants that require this soft-to-hard spelling change:

C to QU	sacar	yo sacé		saqué
G to GU	pagar	yo pagé		pagué
Z to C	comenzar	yo comenzé		comencé

2) Changing a hard sound to a soft sound

Proteger has a soft G, but the first person singular present tense ends in an O, which would make protego – a hard G sound. To make the soft sound, you need to change the G to a J: protejo. Verbs that end in –cer have a similar fix in the pretérito:

C to Z	hacer	él hico		hizo
G to J	proteger	yo protego		protejo

Removing letters

In some cases, extra letters must be removed, because they existed only to get a hard sound in front of a soft vowel but are unnecessary in front of a hard vowel. For example, seguir has a U in front of the I so that the G is hard. For the first person singular, the U must be removed so that rather than siguo, which would be pronounced [see gu o], you have sigo [see go].

GU to G	seguir	yo siguo		sigo
QU to C	delinquir	yo delinquo		delinco

 Conjugations Quiz

Think you’ve got it? Test yourself on Spanish spelling change verbs:

• Multiple choice quiz

 Related lessons

• Present tense
• Pretérito
• Stem-changing verbs
• Introduction to verbs
• Vowels
   

 En français

• Verbes à orthographe corrective
   

 In italiano

• Verbi di cambio ortografico
   

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