Spanish Verb Haber

The word "have" in English can cause us a lot of trouble when we translate into Spanish. That is because the word have can mean so many things in English. Consider the following examples:

The lady had three children.
The lady had a baby last night.
The lady had to give the baby a bottle.
The lady has given the baby the bottle.

Consider that the first sentence is simple possession. Nothing happened at any particular moment of the past that we are looking at which we can pinpoint in time. We are talking about a period of time. In number two, we do focus on a particular moment and in the process this changes the meaning of the verb "had" very drastically. It now means "give birth", not just "possess". In the third sentence we are talking about the responsibility, or obligation to do something. In the fourth sentence, we are describing an event that has been completed sometime before now. All of these ideas, and perhaps some others too, can be expressed with the same verb, "have".

In Spanish we actually have more than one verb to say "have". The one that we are going to focus on in this lesson, however, is POSSESSION. By this we mean, "have" when we mean "I own" something, or "I am holding something in my possession". For this meaning of "have" we use the verb "tiene". Let's see how it fits in our pattern.

The first part of the verb "have" is "tien". Remember, this is the STEM of the verb. Normally, the stem doesn't change. It remains the same in all forms. For the verb "have", however, this is not true. There are going to be some exceptions that we will have to memorize, and they occur in what up to now has seemed to be a rather safe spot, the stem. The verb "have" is an "E" category verb. With that information, we would normally expect to be able to figure out all of the forms on the chart. Unfortunately, with "have" this is not the case.

To begin with, we have to know that the "IE" of the stem will change to "E" when we use the "we" form of the verb. Notice the following chart.

STEM    CATEGORY    MATCH 

TIEN    E           S 
TIEN    E           ... 
TEN     E           MOS 
TIEN    E           N 

You may have noticed that I left out the first line of the chart. That would be the form of the verb that matches "yo", to say "I have". The reason that it was left out is that it is an exception. Remember that in the case of the verb "go" the "yo" form was where we found the exception. This seems to be true quite often. When we are dealing with the present tense of verbs, if there is an irregularity (something that is not predictable), it will usually come in the "yo" form of the verb.

We would expect the first line of the chart to be: TIEN--O, that is, the stem would be "tien", the vowel in the middle (in this case an "e") would drop out, and there would be an "o" on the end. That would give us "tieno" for "I have". This is not the case, however. The "yo" form of the verb "have" is "tengo". We are going to see several other irregular verbs in the future that have a "g" in the "yo" form.